Wino's Paradise

One of the corporate wineries we visited
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So after a long long drive back through Perth and down towards the south, we reached Busselton at about 10pm on a Sunday night.  Busselton is a small town, where the main attraction is a jetty (apparently the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere, and second only to Brighton Pier in the entire world), so as you can imagine, it wasn't too lively when we arrived.  We found a few campsites, but they were either closed for the night, or extremely expensive.  As we drove around we came across another campervan, identical to ours, parked up at the beach.  Although officially you're supposed to stay at a campsite, assuming they were staying there the night, so would we.  So we parked up, Yaz made a scrumptious dinner again, and we settled in for the night.

Thats a lot of wine!
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The next morning we awoke to the most beautiful sunshine, the most beautiful beach, and about five other campervans who had obviously followed the trend.

The jetty itself was huge, and we literally had to walk for 25 minutes to reach the underwater observatory at the end of it.  Unfortunately, the walk wasn't really worthwhile.  Once you've been snorkelling, there isn't really much more to see from a glass tank in the sea.  We left shortly after and made our way to Margret River, the ultimate destination for our journey down south.

A typical Aussie vineyard
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Again, Margret River is a small town, but also beautiful, and is very well known for it's vineyards and wineries.  We checked into the nicest caravan park so far and set about finding a winery tour for the following day.

Luckily for us, the campsite provided discounted tickets for one of the tours we had researched so having booked ourselves in, we decided to head to the main town for a few drinks and to meet the locals.  And so we did....we walked into the first pub we found and ended up talking to a couple of locals all night long about their adventures in Margret River (they were your typical adrenaline junkies, always looking for the next ride).  Some of the stories they told, had us wondering if we should ever step foot into Australian waters again!

The next day we were up early and excited about our day trip......a tour which gave us an excuse to drink wine all day.....superb!

The tour was actually organised really well, we started off with an introductory lunch of steak and salad where we met our guides and fellow winos.  We then headed to the first winery where we sampled a few specialities (namely, Chadonnay's and Cabernet's).  We visited a range of vineyards - both corporates who sold masses of wines all over the world and smaller family businesses who only sold their signature wine to areas in Australia.  Both were impressive and had us pondering what life would be like if we moved to Margaret River and lived off crushed grapes!

We had a wonderful day and met a really friendly australian couple who we later met for our own 'evening tour'.