The Nomadic Explorers | Australian Travel Blog

It is time to tell you about the most family friendly zoo in Melbourne - Werribee Open Range Zoo. Located 30 minutes southwest of the city, it is all about the safari experience which takes you all around the zoo to get up close and personal with the amazing wildlife in a different perspective.

Couple of weeks ago we had a very enjoyable out-of-the-ordinary and spectacular experience walking through Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria: Cranbourne Gardens (former “Australian Garden”). The Garden is an inspiring and immersive display of Australian flora, landscapes, art and architecture. It is a must for anyone with any interest in Australian plants and/or landscape design. End of winter is a great time to wander around, as most of the trees are in bloom and look stunning!

As I already mentioned earlier, Margaret River region has all types of adventures for everyone. In our case, as we had only few hours before heading back to Perth, it was a real challenge to choose where we’d like to go all together.  We decided to visit one of the famous caves in the area. 

There are more than 150 caves in the Margaret River region. These caves belong to a series of complex and fragile karst systems which are landscapes formed by the rapid drainage of water underground. The main road that travels along the Leeuwin Naturaliste Ridge is aptly named Caves Road.

One of the major providers of the caves tours operates three spectacular show caves: Lake, Mammoth and Jewel, but as we’ve been to most of the Australian caves we wanted something different and not to be pressured by crowds or their timetables. The solution came from the Tripadvisor website: there are other caves as well, such as Giants Cave and Calgardup Cave. These caves are operated by the Department of Parks and Wildlife, so it is not allowed to advertise elsewhere except official website. However, lack of advertisements doesn't mean anything. In fact, we were so glad that we visited Calgardup Cave! Unlike the other, well-lit "show-caves" in the Margaret River region, Calgardup is a unique experience below the surface of the earth.

You are probably noticed that usually we "were lucky as we’ve seen/made/did/walked this/that". So you might think that we always on time, on budget and tick all the boxes in our ‘to do/to see list’. Well, it is not. In fact, this blog post will tell you about the time when we were unlucky.

As you might remember, last couple of posts I kept saying that the weather forecast on our way from Albany to Pemberton, Western Australia, wasn’t the best one for travel. It started raining on our way from William Bay National Park down to Tall Timber Country: area between Margaret River and Peaceful Bay / Bow Bridge. We had a huuuuuuuge list of items in Karri Forests that we wanted to look at on our way, but unfortunately as it was raining cats and dogs we had to skip most of them….