Day Trip from Busselton to Yallingup

Busselton to Yallingup is forty kilometres on the Bussell Highway, give or take. You can drive it in forty minutes without stopping, which would be a waste of a perfectly good day. The point of this post is to slow you down. Here's the route I'd give my own visitors if they were staying in Busselton and asked for a day in the South West.

I'm John. I've been on Blythe Rd in Yallingup since 1982. I drive this route most weeks for one thing or another: the markets, the doctor, picking up timber, dropping off a piece. So this is what works.

Photo: Public domain, Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The Busselton Jetty is the obvious place to start and you should start there before the day gets going. It's 1.8 kilometres long and you can walk it in forty minutes. Most people walk halfway and turn back. Don't. The end is the point. That's where the underwater observatory is, and that's where you really feel the scale of the bay.

Get to the foreshore by 7.30am if you can. The light is better, the car park is empty, and the cafe is open. By ten it's busy, by midday in summer it's packed. Early is the answer.

For the full kit, the train out, the underwater observatory, book the Busselton Jetty train ahead. The observatory is worth doing once. Spiral staircase down inside the structure, eight metres below the surface, looking at the artificial reef the piles have become. Soft corals, sponges, a hundred-odd species of fish. The train ride out is fine, but honestly, walk it. You'll feel it more. The boards under your feet are jarrah, the same timber I work with in the gallery, and they make a particular sound over the water.

A longer take on the jetty is a day around the Busselton Jetty if that's the main draw of your day.

Photo: Michelle Corcoran, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

By nine you want to be eating. Eat on the foreshore. There's a couple of decent cafes on the strip near the jetty entrance, or drive five minutes into the centre of Busselton for something more substantial. Don't linger. You've got distance to cover before midday.

Drive west out of Busselton on the Bussell Highway. You'll pass through farming country for about twenty minutes, then the bush thickens up as you get closer to Dunsborough. The road runs roughly parallel to Geographe Bay the whole way.

About twenty-five minutes from the jetty, you're in Dunsborough. It's the lunch town of the South West but you're too early for lunch, so this is a coffee stop. The main strip has half a dozen good cafes. The town beach is right there to get out of the car and stretch.

Don't spend more than half an hour. Save the appetite for later. Dunsborough is the kind of place that swallows whole afternoons if you let it.

For more time on the way back or a fuller take on the town, the Dunsborough day-trip notes.

From Dunsborough, the road forks. The Bussell Highway carries on south. Cape Naturaliste Road peels off to the right, north and west, and dead-ends at the lighthouse.

I'd take the detour. It's about fifteen minutes from Dunsborough. The lighthouse is worth a tour with an hour to spare. The view from the top makes sense of the whole geography of the Capes region. Tighter on time, just walk to the lookout. The track to Sugarloaf Rock is twenty minutes from the car park and that's where I'd take any first-time visitor. You stand on a clifftop with the Indian Ocean directly below you and the limestone stack just offshore. You can see whales going past in season.

Take your visitors to Cape Naturaliste first. Not because you're supposed to, but because once they're standing up there looking out, everything else about this place makes sense.

Drive back to the Bussell Highway and continue south. About ten minutes brings you to the turnoff for Yallingup Caves Rd, and Ngilgi Cave is on the left.

Photo: SeanMack, CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

This is the other side of the day. The Cape is the height and the wind. The cave is the dark and the quiet. Ngilgi was first opened to visitors in the 1890s, one of the original South West cave attractions. The formations are extraordinary. You can do the self-guided wander or a guided tour. The guided ones are better the first time. The rangers know the stories about how the cave was found and what it has meant to the Wadandi traditional owners.

An hour underground will recalibrate the day. There's a cafe at the entrance if you want a quick sandwich, or push on the last ten minutes to Yallingup for lunch. A longer take on the cave is the half-day around Ngilgi Cave.

Yallingup township is small. The Caves House Hotel sits on the hill above the beach. Old building, pub downstairs, decent counter meal in the bar or proper dining upstairs. Or you can drive five minutes back out on Caves Rd to Lamonts at Yallingup, which is the bigger long-lunch room: jarrah floors, big windows on the bush, food worth the time you'll spend there.

If you've kept Cape Naturaliste tight and the cave tight, you'll be sitting down somewhere around 1pm. That's the right time.

After lunch, ten minutes on the sand at Yallingup Beach. A longer take is Yallingup Beach, my version.

Photo: David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

From Yallingup, Smiths Beach is five minutes south. Pull in to the car park, walk down to the sand. Warm day, swim. Smiths is where I go. There's a reason I came here in 1982 and stayed. Some afternoons you walk down there and the light on the water is something a piece of timber can only aspire to.

After Smiths, head another five minutes south to Canal Rocks. There's a granite outcrop where the sea pushes through narrow channels and a wooden footbridge across one of them. Twenty minutes will do it. Two hours if you want.

Timed it right and the afternoon is moving, stay at Canal Rocks for sunset. It's one of the best ones on the coast. The timing piece covers the tide and the light.

Somewhere between lunch and the beach, the workshop is open. Eight minutes from Yallingup township, on Blythe Rd. I built it in 1988. Solid jarrah walls, southwest limestone, all my own work. The viewing window into the workshop is the whole point. You can stand and watch me make whatever I'm making. There's no pressure to buy anything. Pamela runs the gallery.

It's the kind of stop that gives the day a centre. The jetty, the cape, the cave, the beach: they're all the land showing off. The gallery is what one person does with the land over four decades on Blythe Rd.

From the Yallingup pub: up Bussell Hwy three minutes, right on Blythe Rd. Google Maps sometimes misdirects via Wildwood Rd. Stay on Bussell Hwy, turn at the Carbunup store, then Blythe Rd. You'll see the limestone walls.

1. 7am

   Busselton Jetty

   Walk it. End to end. Underwater observatory if booked.
2. 9am

   Breakfast in Busselton

   Foreshore or main street.
3. 10am

   Drive west toward Dunsborough

   Twenty-five minutes.
4. 10.30am

   Dunsborough

   Coffee, stretch, half an hour.
5. 11am

   Cape Naturaliste

   Lookout and Sugarloaf walk. Lighthouse tour if you've got the hour.
6. 12.30pm

   Ngilgi Cave

   Self-guided or short tour.
7. 1.30pm

   Lunch in Yallingup

   Caves House or Lamonts.
8. 3pm

   The gallery on Blythe Rd

   Optional. Walk in. Watch through the viewing window.
9. 4pm

   Smiths Beach

   Walk and swim.
10. 5.30pm

    Canal Rocks

    Stay for sunset.
11. 7pm

    Drive back to Busselton

    Forty minutes if you don't stop.

Don't try to add a winery lunch on top of this. Lunch in Yallingup is enough. For the wineries, do them on a separate day. Tourism Western Australia has a working overview of the region for a longer stay.

Don't drive to Margaret River town. It's another forty minutes south of Yallingup and you'll spend the back half of the day in the car. Save it for next time.

Don't try to walk the full Cape to Cape. A twenty-minute walk to Sugarloaf is enough taste of it for a day trip.

The Bussell Highway between Busselton and Yallingup is a working road. Trucks, locals, occasional kangaroos, the odd peacock outside Carbunup. Don't speed. There's nothing on this drive that gets better if you arrive ten minutes earlier.

Watch the turn at Carbunup. There's the general store and then the road forks. If you're going to my place, that's where you peel off for Blythe Rd.

Photo: David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The trick to this drive is to make it a loop in your head. You start with the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere over open water. You end with one of the better stretches of coast in the country. Between those two anchors you get a cape, a cave, a town, a workshop, and a beach.

You will not see all of the South West in a day. Nobody can. But you can see the spine of it, the relationship between the bay on the north side and the ocean on the west side, and you can see why the people who live here don't leave.

That's the route. Take it slow. The land doesn't go anywhere.