We were on the move again driving through rolling hills of
farmland and heaps of national park for the morning finally making it to
Pemberton for lunch. We headed for the Gloucester Tree to see what all the fuss
was about.
The Gloucester tree is a massive Kari tree, a eucalypt that
only grow in this part of the world, and is 53m tall. Before the advent of
planes some poor buggers used to have to climb up the side of these trees on
small wooden pegs and look for fires in the forests. When planes came along
there were discarded but at some point in the 70s it was too windy to put a
plane up so some lunatic decided to use them again, in the very high winds. To
make sure they were able to be used again they used chunks of reo (round metal
bars) that they whacked into the tree and then put a 2 ton metal structure on
top of it so it was more comfortable!
The boys and I decided it sounded like fun and after 130 or
so of these metal rungs, with only a bit of old chicken wire to stop you
falling away from the tree and NOTHING to stop you falling between the rungs.
The ladder twisted around and around the trunk, being almost vertical in places
to avoid branches. I drilled into the importance of having only one hand or
foot off a rung at any one time. I must have said “two hands, two feet” at
least 130 times on the way up. In the end we were 53m above the ground and the
view was pretty cool looking out over the forest. But even more impressive was
the view looking straight back down, which I know you are not supposed to do.
De, who had decided to stay at the bottom, was almost indistinguishable and
resembled and ant more than a human.
 |
| If you look really really carefully there is what appears to be a white dot on the path at the bottom of the tree...That's De! |
What goes up must come down, but this time we had to do it
very very carefully! Again I chanted the “two hand, two feet” mantra and by the
time we reached the bottom we were all pretty exhausted physically and
mentally.
As we drove to our camping spot for the night there happened to be a
micro brewery along the way and I didn’t take much convincing to stop. It was
perched on the side of a grassy mountain overlooking a vineyard and dam and
between the view and my 660ml glass of beer I was feeling pretty good. We
bought the boys an ice cream to celebrate what was a pretty big effort on their
behalf!
We set up camp and the boys jumped on their bikes going on a
couple of adventures before we retreated inside to escape the cold of the
night.
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