Sunday, 23 May 2010
Big Trees
My trip to Margaret River for their Readers & Writers Festival kicked off at Albany with its whaling station. Then I made two stops to check Western Australia’s big trees, there are plenty of them in the south-west corner of the state. Check our Perth & Western Australia guide for the full story on the Southwest. 
The Tree Top Walk sways through a stand of mighty tingle trees in the Walpole-Nornalup National Park. The 400m long walk takes you up to 40m above ground level, up in the canopy of these huge eucalyptus.
The Tree Top Walk
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Climbing the Gloucester Tree
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The ‘climbing trees’ around Pemberton offer an alternative route to the tree tops. Here the towering eucalypts are karri trees and you get up to the canopy level by clambering up spikes driven in to the tree trunks when selected trees were used as fire lookouts. Today it’s spotter aircraft that perform this duty. As I made my way to the top of the 60m high Gloucester Tree I had one thought on my mind: ‘wow, they let you do this, lots of places in the world would be banning climbers at the first step!’
You didn’t have to get high up in the karri trees to come face to face with crimson rosellas and other parrots. This one perched on our car door frame as soon as we parked. 
Once while Travelling: The Lonely Planet Story