Heavy rain commenced during the night and continued on through the morning. We were woken at about 8 am with the telephone ringing. The folk at the National Warranty Company down in Victoria had decided it was time to make contact with us once more, this time offering a settlement $200 more than the last. Co-incidentally we had assembled our paperwork for the Financial Ombudsman just yesterday afternoon and posted it all off. Needless to say, Chris told them their offer was still unacceptable, advised that we had lodged a formal claim with the Ombudsman and suggested they put their latest offer in writing. It always pays to have a “paper trail” of these matters even if that paper is a series of emails through the strata-sphere or where-ever emails come and go to.
I had planned for us to take the bus into town this morning and do an overview exploratory tour, retracing much of my own trails over the past week, and had even prepared our lunch in anticipation of a prompt getaway. However neither of us were particularly excited about the prospect of walking and waiting in the cold rain. We dallied with alternatives that still included venturing out into the inclement weather, albeit in the car.
Then finally after glimpsing a small patch of blue sky over lunch, we decided to head out for a drive into the Perth Hills, the No 1 Pump Station at the Mundaring Weir our main destination. The road to Kalamunda was familiar, and then we took the Mundaring Weir Road, the obvious route, of course.
The weir or dam was built across the Helena River way back in the late 1890s however it has undergone modification over the intervening years. Work commenced to raise it in the late 1940s, completed in late 1951, and then in the early 1970s, the downstream dam was constructed.
We had a brochure on the Pump Station inviting us to visit this amazing engineering project with apparently “the longest freshwater pipeline in the world”. We do question that, knowing that water is piped from the Murray River to Woomera in South Australia. Anyway, this pipe line, otherwise known as the “Golden Pipeline”, delivers water from Mundaring to Kalgoolie and Coolgardie in the Eastern Goldfields, a distance of 560 kilometres. On average, ninety million litres of water are pumped through the pipeline, in an engineering feat that has continued uninterrupted since 1903.
Unfortunately all the entrances to the pumping station and the parts
open to the public were closed off today, so we had to satisfy ourselves with a
walk across the top of the weir from where we noted the water levels of the
reservoir were quite low despite the rain of the last few weeks, and a walk
from the village up on the opposite hill.
The whole area including the Beelu and Kalamunda National Parks are just
beautiful, bush clad hills with a carpet of grass trees (note I am being very
politically correct and not referring to them as “black boys” anymore). There
were turn offs all along the route leading into picnic spots and parking areas
to access the network of wonderful walks available. The area is well worth a
return visit, in better weather and with correct walking gear.
We carried on to the end of the Mundaring Weir Road, arriving at the
village of Mundaring, a delightful place with an excellent array of shopping
and services, amidst the hills and bush, quite contrary to the satellite of Perth
I was expecting. There we wandered about, purchasing the newspaper and checking
out house prices, which were as we expected; expensive.
The fastest route back to camp would have been via the Great Eastern
Highway, however we returned by way of a series of small roads, meandering our
way along the lower edge of the Hills, past residences established on one acre
sections among the trees, through localities called Mahogany Creek, Glen
Forest, Darlington, Boya, Helena Valley and finally our own Maida Vale.
The rain had held off and we are in a better frame of mind to take in
the busy city streets tomorrow. I will prepare our lunch tonight in
anticipation of an early bus trip.
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