Day 8 south we go

Woke to a miserable day, raining with thunder storms threatened. The sea had calmed a bit and I can now see that on a nice day the north beaches must be nice to swim in - the surfers were having a hard time catching a wave in the morning - but it was not the inviting turquoise sea and sun drenched sand you associate with Perth. It's a shame we haven't seen that.

We drove south to Rockingham and had a look round there. The kwinana oil refinery is a bit of a blot on the landscape, but by the time you get to Rockingham the beaches are nice and the place looks fine. Shoalwater bay is lovely! You could spend a long time exploring penguin island and the surrounds by boat or kayak.(Sorry no photos of Shoalwater bay)

We drove on to Warnbro and Port Kennedy. There are some lovely estates and most of the streets look OK, but some are less cared for than others. The St Michel estates look nice, although quite a way back from the beach. The beach is perhaps not as nice as I thought, but again it was a horrible day so hard to judge.

We looked at a couple of art galleries on the way down and deviated from the road to visit a winery at Cape Bouvard, close to Australind. It is beautiful bush out there, it would be a lovely place for a B & B. We had some not very nice wine served by a rather unhappy lady, who told us kangaroos were vermin that knock down fences and green parakeets should be popped off because they destroy grapes and dig up the lawn. She may be right, but we didn't think it was very good customer service when talking to tourists.Down by the estuary, we saw some Thrombocites which are living organisms that grow.

Just outside Australind, we drove along a coastal road with mostly small farms and saw masses of kangaroos grazing in paddocks near the road. In one paddock we counted about 60. Obviously these people didn't mind them, because they had a watch for kangaroos sign on their driveway, but I can see that if you had stock they could be a nuisance. Sixty kangaroos could eat a lot of grass. To us they are just fascinating. We got lots of video footage of them feeding, scratching and a couple fighting.We stayed the night in Bunbury at the Lighthouse Resort - very good rooms with views over the city and the sea for a very reasonable fee. Finally we had a serious lightning storm and I slept right through it.