Most of the time Mark and I can be found at Diamond Forest Farm Stay but every now and then we get the chance to sneak out for the day for lunch or to just enjoy Pemberton. Generally that usually happens when we have visitors:- that is visitors that have come to see us, like family.
Each time someone visits we try to at least escape for one day and take them sightseeing a little. Each visitor we try to find something that will fit with what they like to do and what they might find enjoyable and interesting. There’s always the fire trees:- The Diamond Tree, The Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree and the Gloucester Tree. I think we have shown pretty much every visitor the Diamond Tree due to it only being 3 km up the road from our front gate and, being in the state forest, it’s free.
So far only one of our visitors have actually climbed the tree:- my fourteen year old nephew and we only let him go to the first platform because, quite frankly, I was just about wetting myself watching him do it. Constantly on my mind was that if he fell his father would never forgive me. Worse still, the whole time he was climbing I was contemplating what would happen if he got stuck up there and was too terrified to come down. I know what would have happened. I would have had to go up and get him and since I’ve not yet made it past the 10th step myself it wasn’t a prospect I was relishing.
These holidays we were looking for something a little different when my in-laws came to visit. Luckily they provided the inspiration. In one of their caravaning magazines they had come across an article on the Goblin Swamp and thought it sounded like an interesting place to visit. I had never heard of it and Mark, while he had heard it mentioned, had never been there. So that’s where we decided to go.
After a bit of googling to find directions we headed off onto the Vasse Highway, past Beedelup Falls, and turned left onto Boat Landing Road (heading towards the Donnelly River Boat Ramp.) We went past the Snottygobble Loop camping ground (yes that is what it is called) to the Goblin Swamp car park. Up until this point nothing looked all that gobliny to me but after a short hike through the trees we came to the Goblin Swamp.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting; Goblin Swamp certainly isn’t all that big but it really does look like a somewhere a Goblin would make his hideout with gnarly, twisted, old trees and spooky shadows. If you let your imagination get the best of you, you could really get yourself creeped out by this place. Definitely a moody, atmospheric spot for the wannabe photographer. It had a real Lord of the Rings feel to it, very Middle Earth and the longer we stayed the more I kept hoping the trees would come alive.
It did occur to me that it would make a great after dark place to visit with torches to tell ghost stories and freak out my ‘oh so cool ‘ nieces and nephews but then I decided it was probably best left for a day visit. All in all, a good day out and I got to see a part of the Southern Forests that I never even knew was there.