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| Tour
departs Saturday; 7.00am Fremantle;
7.30am Perth pick ups. In the morning we travel
through the Swan Valley, stopping at New Norcia, an 1830's Spanish Monastery
town, for morning tea.
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| From New Norcia
we drive through hills and valleys seeing wildflowers unique to the escarpment
- lechenaultias, smokebush, etc, followed by those of the grain country.
Leaving Wubin and the farms, we head east into the outback and see the
first of the everlastings.
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Lunch in the
wildflowers. After lunch, the carpets of wildflowers increase as we travel north
east. Close to
Ninghan Station, we turn north off the highway on to back tracks and travel
across and around enourmous salt lakes surrounded by flowers. We stop at
ancient Aboriginal sheltering caves by the lakes and then at a deserted
goldfield, abandoned mine and town.
Afternoon tea is either in
the flowers or at Reagan's Ford beside the river. We get back to Perth
about 7pm and deliver you to your door.
As the season advances we follow the wildflowers down the south coast with the added bonus of whale watching. On the southern version of our Wildflower Weekends, from the last weekend in September, we head southeast, up the Darling Escarpment, through the
famous Jarrah forests and into rich farmland. The Jarrah forest is alive with wildflowers, both under the trees and along the roadside; morning tea (with delicious home made cakes) amongst the forest flowers.
Travelling through rolling farmland, we sight the Stirling Ranges, Western Australia's most spectacular mountain range. Lunch is in the small village of Cranbrook, often coincident with the local wildflower show. This is an amazing collection from the whole district, of some of the world's most unique wildflowers collected by local enthusiasts.
After lunch we head into the Stirling Range National Park - a very different landscape to the rest of the state: steep rock faces to Eucalypt lined creeks.
We then head out of the hills and east to the south coast wilderness of the Barrens Range and the Fitzgerald National Park.
We arrive at Quaalup Homestead, our accommodation for the night at the base of West Mt Barren, in time for a drink and a mingle with the many kangaroos which gather to feed on the front grass at dusk.
Next morning we venture into the park, seeking out the world's most diverse range of rare, strange and exquisite wildflowers and plant species, along remote 4WD tracks. From Pt Anne, where we have morning tea, we can often see the southern right whales which return each year to this wild coastline to give birth and nurture their young. Miles of white beaches stretch out before us. Around the whale observation post the
flowers grow right down to the sea.
We head north along the Fitzgerald River valley, past the abandoned mine of prehistoric sponges at Twertup, where we have lunch.
Our tour takes different routes back to the city as the season progresses, to seek out the orchids as they come into flower, arriving back into Perth at roughly 7pm and Fremantle at 7.30 pm.
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