Monks, food fests and wavy rocks

The chapel in the former boys' boarding

school.

New Norcia. What a sublime place. I can see why my friend Maureen R. loves to visit it from Perth as we spent two glorious days there, ate several times at the gracious hotel and enjoyed an extensive guided tour, particularly into places not usually seen by people just wandering around.

The history of the place is wonderful and we loved prowling around the museum which shows just how hard those early monks worked when it was first established as a mission in the 1840s. The buildings are wonderful, particularly the former boarding colleges for girls and boys, with glorious, almost Renaissance-style chapels.

Even the hotel, gracious and with a Gone With The Wind staircase, was built as a hostel for the visiting parents of the boarding school students. It serves interesting meals, is

The lovely hotel at New Norcia.

obviously the local watering hole for the farm families around, and we sampled the Abbey ale and wines bearing the New Norcia imprint.

While there we saw a poster at the visitors’ centre advertising the Taste of Chittering. So when we had found Chittering on the map just a bit south of New Norcia, and then discovered Toodyay (pronounced Two-jay) had a lovely little bushland caravan park, we had an enormous journey of about 98km from New Norcia. The caravan park was a joy, set outside Toodyay, with ringneck parrots everywhere, ducks on a couple of dams, a tame peacock called Henry, and a couple of emus kept behind a high fence.

Toodyay is a prosperous, historic town set in the wheatbelt, very pretty, and a short drive through bushland and farmland from the Lower Chittering Hall where the food fest was held on our second day there. It was delightful, not nearly as big as the one we attended in Felton, south of Toowoomba, in April. We found local honey, jams, asparagus, bakery goods, coffees and even paella for lunch. There was a stall covered in wildflowers from one of the local commercial plantations, which sells its flowers direct to Holland and Japan, and even our guide from New Norcia turned up with a colleague as they manned a stall with the New Norcia wines, oils, breads and cakes.

After that, we actually headed east for a while to Wave Rock, just outside a little town called Hyden. We arrived in the early afternoon, so climbed the rock (helped by a few stairs and a chain which one can use to help make the ascent). It wasn’t difficult and the surprise was that, apart from the famous ‘wave’ in the rock, caused by millions of years of water action, there is a dam formed by part of the rock and a dam wall built in 1928 so that the town would have water.

To get here we drove through several wheatbelt towns, all very old, and our favourite probably was York, settled in the 1830s and still full of some glorious old buildings. No centres are very far apart now that we’ve in southern WA. It is very different from the hundreds of kilometres we’ve had to travel in the real Outback just to reach the next town.

Tomorrow we head south, aiming to reach Denmark and then Albany, sometime in the next few days. That will make it nine weeks on the road, and almost 14,000km since we left home.

Sorry . . .Having computer/internet access troubles and can't upload any more pix.

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