Good morning, campers!; surf, turf, and Kim’s multiple skill sets; spectacular spelunking at Ngilgi Cave; Cape Naturaliste lighthouse trivia; big lunch at Little Fish; the culpable kookaburra at Caves House Hotel; of coffee and chillies in Commonage Road; post-mask postlude

I may have mentioned before now that Roy is not a happy camper. I don’t mean it in the sense of his being generally miserable and grumpy (not in this instance, anyway). I mean he doesn’t do camping.

He doesn’t like caravans. Or even campervans. This is inexplicable to me – I love these things, always have.

Let alone those portable shelters made of fabric or other material stretched over a supporting framework of poles and secured to the ground with cords and stakes. In the 29 years since we met, I had never known him to darken a tent flap.

Yet here we were, camping out for two nights in the grounds of Lynn and Kim’s holiday home in Yallingup, Margaret River.

It was, I must say, a very comfortable set-up. For one thing, it’s a 10-person tent. (Kim deadpanned that the other eight refugees would be arriving later that afternoon.)Not only was our blow-up mattress comfy, but it stayed blown up. An elegant table lamp illuminated the space and we had a plug point for charging our various devices.

So, the big question: has Roy been converted to the camping lifestyle? I wouldn’t count on it. It didn’t help that he customarily sleeps kaalgat* – not ideal for a chilly night in the woods. But he learnt his lesson that first night. Come the second evening, he was fetchingly attired in T-shirt and woolly socks. Irresistible!

(*An Afrikaans word, much more descriptive than its English equivalent: naked – or perhaps bare-arsed?)

Kim’s Skill Set

Kim built this impressively solid wooden outdoor dining set last year, while Lynn was locked down in Singapore for a few months. His several other skills include sizzling up a superb surf  ’n’ turf feast of snags, barramundi and prawns for dinner that first night.

Ngilgi Cave

I’d never managed to get Roy to visit any of the caves that the Margaret River region is famous for. But here’s some incontrovertible proof that my husband squeezed himself into Ngilgi Cave and spent the next hour negotiating hundreds of tricky steps – and, inevitably, cracking his head on one of many low-slung rocks.

Ngilgi – previously known  as Yallingup Cave – is considered a “new” cave, being not much more than a million years old. By comparison, South Africa’s famous Cango Caves are more than 20 million years old. Or even 4,500 million years, depending on who’s doing the counting. (Wikipedia says they’re Precambrian, meaning they predate the Cambrian era, which began about 541 million years ago.)

Be that as it may, Ngilgi Cave became a tourist destination in the early 1900s. While concentrating on not braining myself on an overhead rock and falling to my doom, it was fun to think of those early tourists – the gentlemen in hats and three-piece woollen suits, the ladies in full-length skirts – exploring the cave depths for up to eight hours at a time, their way lit only by kerosene lamps, and with none of these helpful barriers, stairs and handrails.

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We did the hour-long semi-guided tour, which was on a half-price ($12) promotion – no doubt to encourage locals to visit during the current international travel hiatus.

Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse

This wasn’t our first visit to Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse (built circa 1903), but until now we’d never brought ourselves to cough up for the guided tour that takes you into and up the tower. As with this morning’s Ngilgi Cave tour, the current half-price promotion – around $10 each – sweetened the deal.

And it was well worth paying for. I generally find that to be the case, whether it’s for a human guide or for one of those audio-guides often provided at museums. Also, it was our guide Reuben’s very last day on the job – and we were the last tour group he led before going off to study environmental science (or something like that).

After taking us through one of the three lighthouse keepers’ cottages – these men worked arduous eight-hour shifts around the clock, before electrification was introduced (only in 1982) – he led us into and up the lighthouse itself and explained its workings, both past and present.

Constructed painstakingly from local limestone that was delivered to nearby Eagle Bay, the 20m-high tower was completed in just 10 months, and for a contractual price of £4,800.

It’s all about the amazing lenses, which are made from prism crystal. Chance Bros. Birmingham, England, produced the whole caboodle in kit form, and the builder reassembled it on site. Click here for more fascinating detail on the lens and turntable, which float on the nearly 160kg of mercury contained in the pedestal below.

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Margaret River has another lighthouse, at Cape Leeuwin, that’s at least as famous and beautiful as the one at Cape Naturaliste. You’ll find it on the most south-westerly point of the Australian continent – not far from Augusta.

Review: Big Lunch at Little Fish

Little Fish is owned by a South African couple Des and Shelley de Klerk, who used to run a seafood restaurant where my favourite coffee and cocktail haunt Island Market now thrives at Trigg Beach, just north of Perth.

(Next door to Little Fish is Gunyulgup Art Gallery, which we’ll have to visit next time.)

Little Fish has a beautiful setting, with a spacious deck overlooking a tranquil lake. You couldn’t fault the food or the service. Roy had the Caesar salad ($29); I had the scallamari ($41) – scallop and calamari combo with rice and a white wine sauce.

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Caves House Hotel, Yallingup

Lynn and Kim say they enjoyed a great Christmas Eve family dinner in this hotel last year. Its public rooms are lovely, with strong elements of Art Deco preserved from the original 1920s structure that was rebuilt in the late 1930s after a fire. And so are the hotel’s extensive and beautifully tended gardens.

So, it would be unfair to review this venerable establishment on the basis of the mediocre curry platter that I ordered from the curry kiosk on its pretty front terrace.  Roy, it must be said, thoroughly enjoyed his oriental-style fish dish when it eventually arrived* from the main kitchen – long after the rest of us had finished our curries.

(*Roy’s order was alleged to have been electronically lost between the till and the kitchen; and therefore, according to the astonishingly brash woman in charge, it was the fault of the till, not the staff, and so there was no need for an apology.)

Culpable kookaburra

Most memorable, however, was the unexpected sight of a kookaburra swooping down the fish and chips of a customer dining solo on the terrace – while she was topping up her wine glass at the bar. “No worries,” she said brightly -“there’s plenty of chips for us both”. That was true. But this was a  kookaburra with a discerning palate: it had swiped the fish and left the chips behind.

I’m glad to report that the Caves House Hotel kitchen replaced the woman’s fish. (Even though its disappearance was most definitely no fault of the management or staff.)

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Chilli-ing in Commonage Road

Like stocking up on Temper Temper chocolate at Cowamarup, and on local produce at Bunbury Farmers’ Market, Commonage Road in Dunsborough is becoming an unmissable stop.

Corynne’s Skin Care is my go-to for handmade soap and essential oils; and at Cape Wholefoods I scored a kilogram bag of dusted ginger for just $15 – an amazing bargain, considering you pay three times that for raw ginger at the supermarket.

This time we found a new treasure: The Cure Coffee Co on the corner of Commonage Road and Faure Lane, Dunsborough. It’s a drive-through, but there’s also seating under a grapevine. Of course the coffee was good, but that’s not what I’ll remember it for.

I’ll remember The Cure for the bowls of free chillies from Sam’s garden. That’s Nick, husband of the generous Sam, making our coffee. And the chillies were delicious, thank you.

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Postlude

So, having skipped the Perth-Peel border an hour before the five-day lockdown commencement deadline of 6pm on 31 January, Roy and I managed to avoid most of the mask-wearing business – except for the last day.

But here we are having coffee at Cottesloe on the way back home to Iluka, suitably protecting ourselves and the community from the invisible yet mighty plague. Sante!