After our drive to Augusta in the south yesterday, we decided that we should explore more of the local Margaret River area today.
We started the day with Jill wanting to find some Margaret River Fudge to take home. The town is well recognized for this sweet product.
We started at the Margaret River Fudge Factory which is just around the corner from our motel, but Jill declared it wasn’t the correct place that she remembered. That meant we needed to try other places that we remembered from a previous trip. So, we went on to ‘The Providore’ assuming that it may have been the place that Jill was thinking of.
The Margaret River Providore sells a combination of products from vineyards, olive groves, organic vegetable gardens and gourmet foods around the region. It’s located on a working farm and provides visitors with an opportunity to stroll through kitchen gardens, watch products being made in the kitchens, sample wines, olive oils and fresh produce and then purchase from a huge selection of gourmet foods and gift items. But they didn’t sell Fudge!
It’s Saturday and many of the wineries that have restaurants were fully booked. We tried Vasse Felix but there was no room at the Inn.
Vasse Felix is the historic founding wine estate of the Margaret River region in Western Australia, established in 1967 by regional pioneer Dr. Tom Cullity. Like most wineries, it offers a cellar door with daily tastings of its regional wine collection. The restaurant is internationally acclaimed.
Our next effort at finding somwhere for lunch was to drive north towards Yallingup to another winery – Swings and Roundabouts. We have eaten there on previous trips but since our last visit it has been modernised and enlarged. So has the number of patrons. It was chocka-block so that had to be ruled out for lunch as well.
In the end, we drove back to The Providore and took advantage of their offer of a toasted sandwich and a glass of wine for $20. It was very pleasant sitting outside on a balmy spring day.
At the suggestion of the staff at The Providore, we drove to the nearby town of Cowaramup to see what the Candy Store there may have offered. Once a sleepy and undiscovered, the town now bustles with activity. The streets and parks are full of fibreglass cows posing for photographs. They don’t move much so they are very easy to photograph. This was originally a timber town in the 1930s. Now, beef, sheep, dairy and viticulture industries all thrive in the area.
The candy store had a wide colection of confectionary but It didn’t quite meet the specifications that Jill wanted, so we went, would you believe, right back to the original shop in Margaret River and found exactly what we needed.
Many place names in Western Australia ending with “-up,” This comes from the Noongar Aboriginal language and means a “place of” or “location of.”
We had been to a beautiful winery here once before but couldn’t remember its name. I actually thought that it was Vasse Felix but that was incorrect. I found the answer by consulting Google Gemini, the AI program that I use. I gave it all the information that I could remember – white building with a dutch type of architecture and a formal garden . It came back immediately with the correct answer – Voyager Estate, just south of Margaret River.
The design of its building with its white washed walls, small pane wooden shutters, high roof, and ornate gables is instantly recognisable as South African Cape Dutch. Many of the South African Cape wine estates were built in this style as far back as the 17th century. The original owner of Voyager Estate was inspired by the grand cellar doors he visited in the Cape area of South Africa and thought it would be appealing to visitors and attract more cellar door visitors.
The last place we visited today was the surfing area near the mouth of the Margaret River. This is one of the world’s premier big-wave surfing destinations, featuring over 75 breaks along its rugged coastline. The car park and beach access are another example of how much has changed since our last visit. What was once a rustic parking lot is now a well planned area befitting a world championship surfing location.
The tide was out at the time of our visit so we didn’t see the normal large waves with people surfing. Instead, the rock ledge by the shore gave us a view of turbulent water boiling over the surface. There is a nice beach area near the river mouth.
Tomorrow, we leave Margaret River and travel about 160 kilometres to Mangimup. It is near the famous Tall Trees forest area of the South West
