Nannup:

This morning, we went to enroll in our classes. I haven¡¦t finalized everything, but it looks like it is going to work out. Later, we went to get our ID cards

Around 1:00, 3 4WD drive vehicles came to pick us up for our drive down south.
The trip to Nannup started with a 2 hour drive to small town of Mandurah. It¡¦s a town built on canals on one side, and an estuary on the other. I had a beef burger, which was a little bit of a surprise. The cattle is allowed to graze here rather than being grain fed, so the beef doesn¡¦t have as much flavor. They also tend to have huge rolls of bread, and not a lot of meat on them. The lettuce on the roll is called salad. I had a great cookie for dessert. Cookies are biscuits, crackers are biscuits and cheese (with or without cheese), and biscuits are called scones. It can be very confusing. After Mandurah, we also passed through the second largest city in WA, which is Brunbury. We went through the outskirts of town, so I really didn¡¦t get to see too much. After about 3 hours, we arrived in Nannup at the Nannup Valley Resort, and had a quiet evening. We had some of the wine with dinner this evening at the Nannup Valley Resort. We thought we would be camping, but instead, we have nice chalets, and everyone has a bed. Not a bad deal. Tomorrow, we¡¦re going to go off-roading. One of the central themes seems to be, ¡§why walk when you can drive?¡¨

We started off the day with a hearty breakfast including grilled bacon, and sausage. Australians really like to barbecue anything that they can. We drove the Land Cruisers to an old timber mill. Only, nothing was there. It turned out that we were looking at an old town site that had been re-planted with trees. The mill was in operation in the 30s, but there was very little evidence that remained. The few things that did, were pretty interesting though. There was still a huge band saw blade , which we were told was the largest in the southern hemisphere at the time, left to rust on the ground. As we walked, Terry (of No Horizons¡XAustralian Adventures, our guide) told us about the history of the area. The next thing we did was a survival game. Given the resources in the forest, and a specific scenario of our plane landing in the bush, we were asked to start figuring out how to survive. My group won from an innovative thatch that was made from the leaves of a grass tree. I¡¦d like to put up as many pictures as possible, but you¡¦ll have to look at my Fotki site to see most of them. The best example of how to survive in the bush was given to us by Terry, who said that we should eat grubs, weave a net to catch fish in, and build a good shelter to keep warm and dry. After the survival game, we drove over to a few really tall trees. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the 27 of us just stretched around a giant Jarra tree. On the way home, we stopped in the town of Nannup to have a look around. There was a very nice antique and old book store, with quite a few traditional tools. We got back to the resort a little early, so there was plenty of time to go for a little hike. Terry owns the Nannup valley resort, and quite a lot of land there. We walked up into a pasture, the second highest point in the area, and had a great view. You could just barely see the ocean form there. The scenery was amazing! Only one problem¡K the grazing cows were a little too friendly. They started so surround us, and began making pretty ugly noises. We were scared for a minute, but stayed calm, and slowly walked away to avoid startling the cows and being trampled to death. I have a video of the cows