Travel writer Cameron Wilson penned this article for The West Australian newspaper after joining our highlights tour on the Cape to Cape Track in Western Australia’s Margaret River region. Here is his story:
It’s a three-hour van ride south from Perth to start this Cape to Cape guided hike, so I’ll spend it getting acquainted with my 24 new hiking buddies. Right away, Sarah and Ros have surprising news. “We’re each with separate groups of school friends from WA,” Sarah says. “For years, we’ve been telling ourselves we’d walk the Cape to Cape.”
The track only opened in April 2001, and today an astonishing 80 per cent of Cape to Cape hikers are from Western Australia.
Boranup Forest. Credit: Cape to Cape Tours
The van drops us near Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse, where we start out on what has evolved into a bucket-list item for WA travellers.
Walking through Boranup Forest. Credit: Ros Holmes
Here on day one, I find out how this works. While 23 of my fellow hikers set out to march 23km, my “Highlights” pal Helen and I hike with them 4km to Sugarloaf Rock, then leave the group and join guide Hannah for a 3km forested loop walk above Meelup Beach. We finish with a swim at magical Meelup, arguably WA’s finest beach.
Our home for seven nights is Surfpoint Resort in the town of Gnarabup near Margaret River, where Cape to Cape Explorer Tours is based. Life here is communal, in keeping with the spirit of a group hike — wash your own dishes, make your own breakfast. Each morning, I find myself in a sort of boisterous boarding-house, people jostling around toasters and sinks, or taking turns at the all-important espresso machine. And where on examination of a detailed Cape to Cape map, I can see the points of road access that mean hikers can leave then rejoin the track.
Day two, and we start again with the group of 25 plus two guides, hiking from Yallingup south via Smith’s Beach and Canal Rocks to Injidup Point. Here, Wadandi-Noongar man Bill Webb meets us and outlines the role he and other custodians play in the journey of spirits departing the Earth. “We guide the spirits to these hidden coastal caves and shafts, on out to the Indian Ocean and beyond the setting sun,” Bill tells us.
Bill Webb. Credit: Cape to Cape Tours
The unique limestone of the Leeuwin-Naturaliste Ridge, composed of quartz sand and marine shell fragments, is the reason these astonishing caves exist. At two million years old, this tamala limestone is young, easily weathered and sits on a much harder — as well as up to 600 million years older — mix of granite and gneiss (pronounced “nice”). Mind-hurtlingly, the ridge only exists because India was joined here to WA 750 million years ago, before it broke away around 132 million years ago.
Besides passing stunning caves and arresting granite boulders, it would be impossible to walk the Cape to Cape without writing about the wildflowers. A botany enthusiast would stop to photograph every five steps and take six months to do this hike. The orchids alone deserve standing applause: who doesn’t want to discover a Dunsborough donkey, a pink fairy, a rattle beak, or my own favourite, the funnel-tipped spider orchid? Start this hike as a regular person (me) then morph into a fevered orchid hunter (me), head permanently a-swivel, on the lookout for something seldom spotted. There are around 3000 species of wildflowers in South West WA, 60 per cent of them found nowhere else.
On granite that is 600 million years old. Credit: Ros Holmes
Day five turns out to be everyone’s favourite. Helen and I get to skip the 7km beach trudge to Redgate Beach (we have a leisurely breakfast instead), although after we join the group, we’ll still hike 15km today. From Redgate, we wind our way up and inland through head-high wildflower heath, the Indian Ocean a blinding cobalt blue on our right. For the last 6km we’re on a 4WD track, further from the coast now and into the Boranup Forest. At first, we see just a few karri trees, peppered with explosions of wildflowers — yellow, pink, orange, purple, fire-engine red, lily white. And then, something more remarkable. The karri is a giant eucalypt (Eucalyptus diversicolor), handsomely streaked dark grey, or brown, or silver; other smooth trunk eucalypts have a matt finish, but the karri has a satin sheen. Now, with the late afternoon sunlight slanting in through the trees, this forest is actually glowing.
“Not often you see an osprey bathing,” observes guide Hannah gleefully, pointing to the one fluffing its feathers in the shallows of the far bank as we glide by. A pair of cormorants sun themselves on branches of fallen riverside trees, stretching out their long necks to give their long beaks a shake.
Last day, weaving through limestone canyons. Credit: Ros Holmes
Soon enough we’re drying off ourselves, before a scheduled visit to mighty Mammoth Cave. It’s an easily overlooked fact that Caves Road, the north-south arterial highway between the capes, was named for its extraordinary caverns, the original reason for tourism here in the early 1900s.
Inside Mammoth Cave, water seeps through cracks in the ceiling, heavy with dissolved minerals — the stalactites (ceiling) and stalagmites (floor) are accumulations of these dripping minerals. Over millennia some will meet in the middle, creating perfect columns.
As if to add insult to injury — and just when I was thinking not to make too much of a brilliant day to worn-out hikers — they straggle in looking like forlorn and slightly damp rats. While Helen and I enjoyed bone-dry and serene kayaking followed by an hour in the fairytale atmosphere of Mammoth Cave, less than 10km away, the hiking group was on the beach battling driving rain.
Cam and Helen kayaking on the Margaret River. Credit: Supplied
Inevitably, by the last leg, a couple of hikers, sore-footed and weary, default to the “Highlights” program. Sarah and Liz need a break from the march, so after the 25 of us have zigged and zagged our way through knee-high canyons of weathered limestone, they leave the track and join Helen and me for a van visit to Hamelin Bay.
For the final 2km stretch we’re all together again, homing in on the place where two oceans, the Southern and the Indian, collide. I’ve hiked 60 of the 125km over these past seven days, and well and truly stretched the limits of what I can do. But like everyone else, I’ll end with my hands on the Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse, which was inaugurated in 1895.
Funnel-tipped spider orchid. Credit: Ros Holmes
I’m last in the group to finish on the track, hanging back with Rosie while she takes her last few photographs, and together we watch in awe as a dry storm gathers in the wind.
“Proper lighthouse weather,” Rosie observes. “It’s just how I’d imagined we’d finish the Cape to Cape”.
+ Cameron Wilson was a guest of Cape to Cape Explorer Tours. They have not influenced this story, or read it before publication.
