Western Australia: Tip-toe quietly through the treetops

Ross Currie was standing very still. This was because he was a long way off the ground. With his feet together on a thin rung of a fair-dinkum Aussie homemade bush ladder, and his hands firmly holding the next rung up, he had reached the moment when he had to decide whether he would keep climbing or reverse from the neck-achingly tall Australian karri known as the Gloucester Tree.

Towering 61m in southwest Australia's Gloucester National Park, the Gloucester Tree is renowned as "the world's tallest fire lookout", and has a steel "tree-hut" perched on top for optimum fire spotting.

Built in 1946, the lookout is still available for emergency use, but is primarily a tourist activity that attracts thousands of visitors annually to the small town of Pemberton.

Decision made, Currie - from Nelson and, at barely half-a-century in age, the youngest member of his tour group - made a steady climb to the top, closely watched by his travelling companions.

No one could have blamed him if he'd flagged it. The ladder can only be described as an open-plan spiral staircase of long pegs hammered around and around the tree's trunk.

Having been told that thousands of other wily tourists make it to the top every year does nothing to quieten the heartbeat of even the mildly vertigo-impaired.

Reassuringly, the adrenalin-pumping tree climb is purely an optional activity on this Wildflowers Tour, where the emphasis is mostly on things lower to the ground.

The Western Australia Wildflowers Tour has been setting off from New Zealand every year for almost two decades, organised by a small tour-specialist company in Auckland's Remuera called Travelworks.

As stunning as the wildflowers are, there is a lot more to this journey. Even travellers who don't know an orchid from a lily will experience memorable places and activities daily as the luxury coach wends its way around the southwestern corner of Australia.

The tour guiding style of Peter Davies has a lot to do with that.

Davies admits he is "passionate about history" and a voracious reader on anything about early Western Australia and Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world.

Boarding the coach at the start of the second morning, one passenger was impressed enough to tell Davies "what a nice voice" he had and how "easy" he was to listen to.

Davies clearly relishes telling a good yarn, using the luxury coach's speaker system with a comfortable style that would go just as well sitting around a campfire. He doesn't just impart facts and figures, but tells mini-sagas (none of them boring) of the people who first settled this part of Australia and their struggles to tame it.

More than once, Davies was asked if he was reading from notes, so sharp is his memory for names, dates and details. He makes this tour as much about the region's history as it is about its wildflowers and magnificent forests.

He knows his flowers, too - and where to find them.

If you plan to book this tour (the next departure is on September 12), forget any preconceived ideas of fields carpeted in wildflowers. Carpets of flowers tend to grow in an area around 300km north of Perth, says Davies, but their display is dependent on rainfall levels.

Planning an itinerary around them can be all too nerve-racking, he says. What could be a breath-taking display one year could be a disaster the next.

Thousands more of Western Australia's wildflowers grow in a much less obvious manner and - surprisingly - finding these delicate, exotic and often shy little flowers is kind of exciting.

Just when the highways begin to seem all the same, the view suddenly changes. The riot of colourful, mauve-flowered hovea bushing up between the armies of gigantic, white-trunked karri trees peters out and is replaced by the canary-yellow clouds of the water bush flowers, or the reds of the coral vine's pea-flowers.

Invariably, the highways are edged with berms of red soil, looking like terracotta carpets dividing the tarseal from the walls of forest on either side.

Somehow, our guide recognises one opening in the forest from another, directing our coach driver to pull off the highway so we can go exploring. Invariably, excited shouts indicate yet another unusual and exotic tiny flower has been found.

Tiny cowslip orchids pop their heads up among fallen bark, branches and leaf debris of the giant trees, masses of flowering vines and bushes that fill the forests.

There's an abundance, too, of bird-life, including the stunning, iridescent cobalt-blue Splendid Fairy Wren, though they flit about so fast it is difficult to study them in detail.

Sadly, spotting wild koala bears in the treetops will not be a highlight in this corner of Australia, and while kangaroo droppings were providing compost in abundance, we were less lucky than past wildflower tour groups in spotting them.

The closest we came to witnessing kangaroos in the wild were their black silhouettes painted on roo-warning road signs.

But other wildlife highlights included the metre-long Tiger snake that brought the coach to a stop, as it languidly slithered across the highway.

At another stop, a hefty blue-tongued lizard basking on a rock proved to be more scared of us than we were of it, darting away when we came too close.

Walking in the Valley of the Giants is undoubtedly one of the most memorable days on the itinerary. An impressive feat of engineering called the Treetop Walk was built as a tourist attraction, turning the nearby sleepy town of Walpole into a thriving tourism service centre.

The walkway is rather like a metal bridge or boardwalk that leads you on a 600m loop through the canopy of the ancient eucalyptus known as tingle trees.

Nowhere near as scary as the climb up the fire lookout tree, it at least has reasonably high metal railings. But, the lofty boardwalk has a see-through mesh metal floor and the structure moves in small rhythmic waves as people walk along it - just enough to test the nerves.

Most of our group were prepared to walk from one end to the other, though some steadfastly refused to look directly down to the forest floor 40m below.

In sharp contrast on the forest floor, the Ancient Empire walk is wonderfully calming and peaceful but still awe-inspiring. A sturdy wooden boardwalk meanders 800m through the forest, built protectively over the delicate root systems of the tingle trees and other flora.

Here, you can touch the magnificent tree trunks - some are up to 16m in circumference - and even walk through gaping hollows in the bases of some of the trees damaged but not killed by forest fires.

These are surely the trees that feature in the old fairy tales where trees have big hooded-eyes, stumpy noses and mouths. This is also home to the intriguing She-oaks, with their intricate bark that literally sticks out like shavings of chocolate, resembling Flake chocolate bars.

Davies tells us this tree got its name from the early settlers who discovered its grain resembled their traditional English oak, but as the timber was softer and weaker, it was labelled "she-oak".)

Other highlights range from the remote Cape Leeuwin and its 108-year-old lighthouse, where the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet tumultuously, to the tranquil depths of the Jewel Cave in Augusta, where our guide turned out to be an expatriate New Zealander named Chris Cummings.

So, don't assume this tour will just be fawning over flowers. Expect some intriguing history, magnificent geography and the comfort and fine food of Miss Maud's Hotel in Perth, a highlight in itself.

* Victoria Bartle joined the Wildflowers Tour courtesy of Travelworks, Auckland and travelled to Perth courtesy of Air New Zealand.
Details of the Wildflowers Tour are available from Travelworks at (09) 522 0330 or www.travelworks.co.nz
Tourism Western Australia is on the web at www.westernaustralia.com