Sue Zann Toh

I had the intention to practice yoga on our beautiful deck in the morning. I planned to do this ever since we decided to go on this holiday. Well, as things don’t always go according to plan, I didn’t get any practice in during this weekend away. After the exhausting first day with the drive down south, horse riding and great food at Ze Arc of Iris, I couldn’t bring myself to crawl out of bed at the crack of dawn to practice. Instead, I had a nice sleep in before getting up for our next adventure, mountain bike riding.

Dirty Detours MTB Adventures were our hosts for this adventure. We were going mountain bike riding through the Boranup forest. We’ve been to the Boranup forest twice before by car, the first time was with the encounter with emus and the second time was during an extended a trip in 2005 (I still haven’t finished posting about that trip! There’s a lot to write!).

We were taking the easy ride, since neither my partner and I had gone “real” mountain bike riding, we thought it would be better to classify ourselves as beginners. We did some street riding over the summer, going out for an hour at a time and sometimes more, but this mountain bike riding was serious stuff.

We didn’t want to eat too much before the ride, we had a light breakfast at our favourite breakfast spot, Sails, then made our way to the Settlers Tavern, our meeting point with Dirty Detours.

Our guide drove us to the Boranup forest from the town center, about 20 to 30 minutes drive. The weather didn’t look too good, it was overcast, cloudy and cold. It rained pretty heavily on the way there, and we were worried about getting soaking wet. In the end, I was actually thankful that it was on the cooler side. We got gently drizzled on during the ride and it was quite nice, refreshing and cooling.

Once in the forest, we were armed with a mountain bike each, riding gloves, hydration pack, our own helmets (we’re fussy about helmets!) and a quick mountain bike riding lesson 101, then off we went. I felt like an utter spastic most of the time on a mountain bike! The guide kept trying to give me tips, and as my brain would have it, I would do the complete opposite of what she was telling me! Not on purpose, I’m just a spastic sometimes.

The downside of the riding was that M’s bike broke something just about 30 minutes into the ride. We were really starting to get into it when this happened. After spending close to an hour trying to fix the damn thing (Our guide wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty! Hence Dirty Detours, I suppose), we ended up getting it in a usable condition and moved on.

Our guide took us to the most awe-inspiring spot in the forest. You really feel small and insignificant among the huge karri trees. There were a few baby drops and really narrow paths, but nothing very difficult or scary. When something looked a little too much for me, I’d just get off and carry the bike over (or under) the obstacle.

I was afraid I wasn’t going to be fit enough for this ride, but I held up ok. In the end, the biggest learning for me was “Look where you DON’T want to crash”. The body has a funny way of following where your eyes are looking. I fell/crashed off the bike a total of half a dozen times or so and got scratched up and knocked about a bit. You can probably guess that I enjoyed our jacuzzi after that adventure!

After our relative short mountain bike riding experience, we headed back to Margaret River’s town center and had a nice, long, leisurely lunch at VAT 107, another one of our favourite restaurants in Margaret River.

After our long lunch, we headed back to our villa at Losari Retreat and sat in our outdoors jacuzzi for a few hours. The jacuzzi was fantastic and just what I needed after all that riding around in the forest. We pretty much didn’t leave the jacuzzi until we got ravenously hungry for dinner and headed back to the town center.

Our dinner spot was Goodfella’s Cafe. I use to remember their food as being quite good, but this time, it was really quite inedible. I had some sort of chili pizza thing, which sounded good, but I couldn’t eat more than one slice because it would burn my mouth. Now, I can eat some pretty hot and spicy foods, but this was ridiculous! I ended up forcing down 3 slices before giving up and having a sticky date pudding dessert.

No surprise, after dinner we were back at our villa… in the jacuzzi… again.