The reader joins us, on James Dane’s birthday, in Kondinin, which I believe is Aboriginal for the posterior of nowhere!

To pick up the story from where we left off… …we did climb a big tree on Sunday. Or at least, K did. I got 25m up and decided that I’d had enough. I don’t consider myself to be afraid of heights, but climbing pegs around the outside of 75m tree was enough to make me get a bit dry in the mouth and a bit wobbly in the legs. The views from 25m were pretty spectacular. K kindly brought my camera to the very top of The Bicentennial Tree and too some shots from there. They’re pretty impressive, too. Again, once I get a decent Internet connection, you will be able to share in these photographs. A decent Internet connection is now a necessity before the end of the month as I’m informed that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs require that I file a tax return for 2004/05 by the end of January. Deep joy!

Back to the trees… We left Pemberton bright and early on Monday morning and headed off for some more tall trees. The Treetop Walk in The Valley of the Giants was Mrs J’s must-see in West-urn Australia and it was conveniently situated on our route from Pemberton to Albany. On this occasion, I managed the entire 600m bridged walkway, which ascends to 40m above the ground without any problems, even when the walkway started swaying considerably! The views were spectacular!

Even more interesting than The Treetop Walk was the (free) Empire walk, through the various gum trees. It’s fantastic the way these indigenous trees recover from forest fires.

We stopped off en route to Albany at Denmark’s Ocean Beach for a lunchtime picnic and to watch the young surfers take lessons. We both quite fancied joining in, actually. Once back on the road we made good time down to Albany, making it to the YHA before their office opened for the evening. We paid a visit to The Old Gaol, but to be honest once you’ve seen one old colonial prison, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

Rocks seem to be the big thing at the moment. Albany houses a rock at the side of the road, which locals claim looks like a dog. We wandered up to take a look at it, and, with the help of the signs of a couple of local businesses that take their name from Dog Rock and a helpfully painted-on dog collar, we could make out why they name the rock Dog Rock, but if you look at it form the other side, it looks more like a bottlenose dolphin. Far more interesting, if you ask me (and even if you don’t: it’s my blog), were the pink parrots flying overhead. The birds here are amazing, so brightly coloured.

Today’s activities have been largely rock-related, too. We’ve driven about 500 kilometres (paj’s rule of thumb for converting kilometres to miles, stick a zero on the end and half four times {500, 5000, 2500, 1250, 625, 313}, simple!) inland to see the phenomenom that is Wave Rock. Again, you’ll have to wait to see the snaps. Nearby is the Hippo’s Yawn, which is another huge rock that if you squint sideways in the right light after the correct amount of alcohol, you’ll see looks astoundingly akin to a hippopotamus yawing. Really.

Bizarrely, having driven so far, I’m sure that today we’ve seen more horses made of tin than we have seen cars! The Tin Horse Highway stretches for 20km {20, 200, 100, 50, 25, 12.5} from East to West Kulin. This proved a useful source of amusement on the long stretch from Wagin, The Home of The Big Ram. The Big Ram being our fourth Big Thing, keeping our average above one per week.

We stopped driving before twilight as that’s when the kangaroos start foraging and we didn’t want to be hitting one of those with The Beast. Kondinin presented itself as a friendly enough town with a couple of motels. The one we’ve chosen to stop at has a bar next-door, which is dead handy. This is a small town (population _c._250) and just to prove what a small world it is, the barmaid went to the same school as a guy I used to work with!