Seriously, I wish this rain would just bugger off or turn into a full on rain depression. Today it was shower after shower of light rain. Just enough to be annoying. However, today was also one of wonderful memories for Philip and I. You might recall me saying that our romance blossomed in Western Australia in 1976. I flew over to Perth to meet up with Philip who had been working here for some months. I arrived for the Christmas/New Year of 1976. We spent most of our time in Perth but for New Year Philip and I and a few friends drove down from Perth to Yallingup in the Margaret River Region. A few of our friends were made keen surfers so it was no surprise that this area was chosen.
When we drove into Yallingup today it just brought back so many almost forgotten memories. The first place we came upon was the Yallingup Caves Hotel and straight away we knew it was the same place we had eaten at and probably got a little drunk at. The Hotel was built in 1903 as a guest house but in 1938 it was rebuilt after a devastating fire. It has seen many different owners but when we were here in 1976 Yallingup was a Mecca for surfers and as it is only a short walk from the beach the beer garden was where it all happened.
The gardens at the Yallingup Caves Hotel are now Heritage listed and the hotel glows with a Raffles or Somerset Maugham ambience of the 1930's and is still a joy to behold.
After we had toured the hotel and gardens we drove to Yallingup Beach, another memory. Philip remembers swimming out to a large rock and clambering up the sides of it but I don't remember that at all. I would have been lying in the sun at the time 🌞. We didn't see any large rocks here but we did find the camping area that we stayed at. Of course now it is very modern but back in '76 it was camping only.
The next place on our agenda today was the little hamlet of Dunsborough where the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse is situated. It appears that we are not meant to climb any lighthouses on this trip because when we lined up to purchase tour tickets we were told that there was a group of school kids touring the lighthouse and would we like to come back at 2.00pm. It was 11am. No thank you. So we had to be content with wandering around the outside of the lighthouse. That took a whole ten minutes so we then decided to walk part of the Cape Naturaliste Coastal Walk to Wilanup lookout that was just a 3km walk. The walk was lovely and we stopped and photographed the wildflowers, but it was so windy and those blasted showers kept coming in off the ocean. The views from the lookout however were spectacular.
We had really built up an appetite by now so we chose to go to the Wild Hop Brewing Co for lunch. When we turned into the carpark we almost turned around as there were so many cars parked here so we knew it was going to be hard to get a table. The concierge offered us a choice of either a table outside or a leather Chesterfield beside the fireplace. We chose the Chesterfield even though we knew it would be hard to eat our meal from the coffee table. Lucky for us though, just before our meal arrived a table opened up right beside us. Thank you! 🙏
My meal was nice enough - a baguette filled with roast pork and quite a delicious daikon salad but Philips meal was outstanding and I had serious food envy. He chose the Braised Beef Steaks with Parsnip Puree with a Truffle Jus. Delicious.
To walk off our lunch we took a stroll around the lovely gardens where they grow a lot of their own herbs and some vegetables. We got talking to one of the owners who was out watering the garden and she was so passionate about her garden and also told us the difficulties that she has growing some things. We sympathised with her after having the same sort of problems at Julatten. We both agreed that using raised garden beds makes garden growing more controllable.
It has been a lovely walk down memory lane today with lots of reminiscing and laughs. This is truly a beautiful area and as I said previously we are only touching on some of the many places to visit. It is a place that we could easily return to and we commented if it was a perfect world we would live here in the summer months and at Palm Cove for the winter months. Ah well. We can only dream.....
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