Coalmine Beach, WA

The loveliest camp site we have been in all trip. Coalmine Beach Holiday Park is in the Walpole-Nornalup National Park.

It’s like a bush camp, lots of trees, scrub, blue fairy wrens, kangaroos, a path down to Coalmine Beach for swimming or kayaking, bike and walking paths including the Bibbulmun Track. It’s between two lovely little towns, Walpole and Denmark with all their laid back tourist attractions like chocolatiers, icecreameries, great coffee, breweries, lots of wineries, swimming beaches, forest walks and award winning pies at Denmark Bakery.

This guy was around a lot, and very curious.

Tim cooked jaffles and damper over the open fire. We also made beef and red wine slow cook, using our new camp stove to brown off the meat and cook the rice.

We rode our bikes along the bike path to the Knoll Tourist Loop Drive. Having ridden for over half an hour on what we thought was the loop, we came to an interesction. With only a mud map to follow we decided we had just got to the start of the loop, being hilly we were quite tired by this time and decided we couldn’t face doing the loop, also the sky was heavy with dark rain clouds, so we turned around and headed back. Only to come to the same intersection again. Seems that we had done the loop twice, once in each direction! The bike path had enter the loop just after the intersection and thus we didn’t pass it the first time around. Oh well, it was a great ride up and down so many hills and we ended up doing 11 km instead of 6 km but we had a laugh anyway.

Swimming and Snorkelling at Greens Pool near Denmark was fabulous, the water was warm, clear and almost completely sheltered from the ocean by a natural wall of rocks. We took our GoPro for the first time and got lots of underwater pictures.

Peaceful Bay which wasn’t so peaceful the day we went, very strong wind.

Conspicuous Cliff where a green tree snake passed right in front of our feet. We were trying so hard not to step on it that we didn’t get a photo, but it was a gorgeous green.

The Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk. 40 metres above the giant tingle tree forest. Tingle trees are a type of giant eucalyptus that grow to be 55 metres high, 24 metres circumference and live for 400 years. They have sensitive, shallow roots.

Cirular Pool in the Walpole-Nornalup National Park is on the Frankland River is a beautiful spot for a picnic, swim, kayaking or climbing over the rocks.

Circular Pool, Frankland River, Walpole-Nornalup NP

We visited one of the many wineries in the are, Valley of the Giants Wines and Olives, their rose was particularly nice and the olives are fabulous.

The Elephants Rock Cider Co and Toffee Factory in Denmark. The straight ciders were nice, but the ones flavoured with toffee, ginger, strawberry etc, were not to our liking.