Keen for a walk in Australia’s South West? With fresh air and crystal clear water the views don’t get much better than this. These photos are just taken on my phone and haven’t been edited at all.
Starting from the lookout carpark at Yallingup you have a short easy walk uphill in a southerly direction. It’s a gravel trail until you reach the next lookout at Torpdeo rocks. Here you can choose to walk the beach past Supertubes and Smiths Reef or move inland slightly as we did and walk a not especially pretty bush track that saves you trudging through all that beach sand. It also offers more shade.
You will pop out where the little creek bed ends and can then head up to the car park if you want to grab a drink or use the bathroom, otherwise continue along the beach towards the rocks. Now the trail takes you over some beautiful granite outcrops, past the “aquarium” which used to be a great local secret spot but is now well known and often packed! It’s a beautiful swimming hole and a great spot to snorkel.
The track can be hard to find as you leave the aquarium but it soon turns into a super cute woodland trail that will have you ducking and bending. Eventually you will pop out at a gravel car park. You will need to cross the bitumen road unless the want to head down to Canal Rocks themselves. Canal Rocks has a picturesque bridge that is a lot of fun to swim under and snorkel in – though not for the faint hearted in a big swell! I’ve grown up swimming in here, but never accomplished the requisite backflip off the bridge!!! Some of the recent arial shots coming out of canal rocks are stunning.
But I digress, once you cross the road you will begin a steep ascent to a lookout I never knew existed until last month! It provides a beautiful panorama of the bay. You then head up and over the hill through some stunning scenery until eventually descending down a steep narrow stepped path and then you’re almost finished at Wyadup Rocks and what is now famously known as the Inji Spa. I’ve heard this is now listed in Lonely Planet and unless you come at the crack of dawn or in the middle of winter ie when it’s too cold to swim, you’re unlikely to get it without a massive crowd.
It seems a real shame that social media now allows people to geotag locations. The days of the secret spot are gone and if those special places are busy for us here in the south west I can’t imagine what it must be like for the locals in more highly populated areas. With the internet and google maps it’s so easy to find spots that otherwise you would have come upon by surprise or needed to be let in on the secret, but such is life and progress I guess!
This section of the C2C is about 6 km long. We parked a car at either end so we only had to walk one way. Expect it to take twice as long as you would usually do that distance as trust me – there are so many photo ops and speccy views, of course, the camera never does it justice! This trail would be safe to walk alone, although if you had a medical problem it might be a while before someone came across you – especially between Canal Rocks and Wyadup Rocks.
Have you walked any of the C2C track? Which part should I do next?
J.A.B 