The southwest corner

From Perth, we now headed to the southwest corner of Australia. The first stop was Busselton with a jetty that stretches 1.8 km into the sea. Shortly after, we reached Cape Naturaliste with a beautiful lighthouse. On the way, we saw an echidna (spiny anteater, quite rare, it was only the second one we have ever seen in the wild) on the side of the road, but unfortunately, it disappeared into the bush as soon as we stopped. No photo, very disappointing! The southwesternmost point of Australia (superlatives are important) is reached at Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern (they call it 'Southern') Oceans meet.

Between the two capes, there is a karst formation that stretches for almost 100 km and includes many stalactite caves. We visited 3 of them.

Further east, there are forests full of giant eucalyptus trees (karri, tingle trees, ...) - we also spent a few hours exploring them.

Finally, we also planned two (mountain) hikes, one of which - in the Stirling Range - involved overcoming 600 vertical meters over a distance of 3 km. The second hike had fewer vertical meters, but we had to climb a bit to reach the final lookout platform. At the beginning of this hike, there were a few kangaroos standing in the middle of the path, hindering our progress (because we had to take pictures of them).

Overall, we keep realizing that the days are simply too short to fit in everything we want to do. We are limited by breakfast times (from 7:30 am) and the onset of darkness (6:00 pm). And since breakfast is an essential part of our vacation feeling, which we don't want to miss out on as much as possible, the problem will probably largely remain ... until we travel to the next state (South Australia is 2.5 hours further than Western Australia, where we currently are - then the sunset will be set at 8:00 pm).