Day 2: Hewlitts Hill to Waalegh via Italy

25 March, about 30km

I woke up before dawn and just enjoyed my warm, comfy sleeping bag for a bit. Eventually, I got up, made breakfast and packed up. I’m sure I’ll get a little quicker with more practice - this morning, it felt like I repacked my backpack five times because I kept finding stuff that needed to go to the bottom, then rembering my mueslibars were somewhere inaccessible, then realising I was still wearing my fleece jumper that needed to get packed and do on... oh well, it’s not like I’m in a rush to get to any meetings or appointments 😀

I started walking about 7:30am and it was really beautiful with the sun still low shining through the gum trees. I made my way up to a few lookouts to 

Mundaring weir and eventually down to the weir itself. Now, that area had a bit of Italian vibe in the Perth hills 😃. 

I walked across the damn and then stopped at the hotel for a coffee. 

I was greeted by Tiger who then joined me for a coffee in the garden as I was the only guest. All very Mediterranean, but I’m sure the place would be pumping with a slightly different audience on a Friday night! 

I made my way past the Perth Hills Discovery Centre / probably a place to come back to at some point. 

The rest of the morning was undulating through a lot of burnt forest with lots of beautiful regrowth. 

When I was about to start looking for a lunch spot, I was very annoyed to realise that I was at the start of a long stretch that had been bulldozed probably a couple of years ago. Everyone who has ever been on a bushwalk with me knows that I can be very particular about my choices of lunch spots - shade, a view, a log to sit on - it all needs to be just perfect. So it took me a long time to eventually give up and settle for log and shade, but no views. As usual, when I started walking again, it took all but 5 min for the perfect spot to appear (Olena and Cris will be rolling their eyes right now 😄). 

The afternoon had quite a bit of climbing and I slipped twice on some pretty steep, sandy  downhills. The vegetation changed a bit to white ghost gums (I think- will need to check what they actually are). 

I made it to beautiful Waalegh campsite which again I have completely to myself.