The Yallingup Art-Lover's Weekend: A 2-Day Itinerary

If someone told me they had 48 hours in Yallingup and they wanted to understand what the region actually is, beyond the wine, this is what I'd tell them.

It's not the standard itinerary. The standard itinerary is three cellar doors, a chocolate shop and a beach. That's a fine weekend. It's also the version that leaves you not knowing why anyone lives down here. The version below is the one where you start to understand.

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

Get up early. Drive down to Smiths. There'll be three or four cars and a surfer wading out at the southern end. Walk the length of it. Don't take photos for the first ten minutes. Just look.

This is my home beach. I've been walking it for forty years and I still don't take it for granted. The light at this hour is doing something the rest of the day can't replicate: pale, sideways, picking out the lines in the reef. You'll see why people who live here don't leave.

Breakfast on the bonnet of the car works. So does the bakery in Dunsborough on the way to the cave.

Drive back up Caves Rd to Ngilgi. The first show cave that opened in Western Australia, back in 1900, and the local Wadandi people knew it long before that. Doors open at 9am and last entry is 4pm. Allow an hour and a half to do it properly.

Book the morning cave tour ahead of time on the Capes Foundation site. They get busy from Easter through October. The Koomal Dreaming cultural tour with Josh Whiteland is the one to book. Two and a half hours, with traditional fire-lighting and didgeridoo in the cave. It changes how you look at the country for the rest of the weekend.

Photo: SeanMack, CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

You come up out of the cave and you need somewhere to put what just happened. Five minutes down Blythe Rd, that's me.

The gallery is the Day 1 cultural anchor for a reason. The walls are solid jarrah and southwest limestone — the same limestone the cave is carved out of. I built them in 1988. Inside is my furniture, Alan Fox's glass, Julia Carter's paintings, Dylan Fox's photography, and the workshop viewing window where you can see whatever I'm building that day. Forty-five minutes is about right. Pamela's at the front.

If you're visiting in September, the timing is even better. Open Studios if you're visiting in September opens 150 artists' workshops across the region for a fortnight. The gallery is one of about a dozen Yallingup studios on the trail. a gallery day, self-driven for the full route.

Twenty minutes down Caves Rd. The Vineyard Kitchen is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm. The long lunch is $80 a head: entree, main, dessert, paired with their wine. It sits you in front of a window onto the vines for two and a half hours. Book Clairault Streicker cellar door ahead, particularly on a Saturday. The cellar door itself is open 10am to 5pm Wednesday through Sunday.

I send art-lovers here rather than Vasse Felix on Day 1 because the room is quieter, the food is more direct, and you've got Vasse Felix saved for tomorrow when you'll need it.

Drive back up Caves Rd toward Yallingup. Turn left onto Canal Rocks Rd. Park at the end. Walk the rock platform. There's a steel walkway over the channel where the water comes through, and it sounds the way the inside of a piece of timber sounds when you tap it. You'll get the metaphor when you see it.

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

With good light and an hour to spare, walk fifteen minutes south along the coast to Sugarloaf Rock. Same headland, different angle, and one of the most-photographed pieces of coastline in the South West. Save Sugarloaf for sunset where possible.

Sugarloaf at sunset is what you came here for. There's a viewing platform, a car park, and almost always somebody else with a camera. Don't be the person who only watches it through a screen. Stand at the edge for ten minutes, no phone.

Drive back into Yallingup. Wills Domain is on Brash Rd, just off Caves Rd. The restaurant is open Thursday to Monday, lunch service only from 12 to 3. For dinner on a weekend, ring ahead. They sometimes do evening sittings for events, and the cellar door is open until 5pm if you want a tasting before you eat anywhere else.

If they're not on for dinner that night, the alternative is anywhere along the Caves Rd strip. Yallingup Wood-Fired Bread does evening meals on certain nights, and Lamont's at Smiths is dependable. End the day with a walk down the road from wherever you're sleeping. The stars down here will surprise you.

Two choices, depending on what kind of person you are.

Option A, Cape Naturaliste. Drive up to the lighthouse. The walk from the car park out to the whale lookout is twenty minutes one way, mostly flat, and from June to November you'll see humpbacks tracking up the coast. The view from the lookout is what convinces every visitor that the South West is unlike anywhere else.

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

Option B, Margaret River Farmers Market. Saturdays only, 7:30am to 11:30am, at the Margaret River Education Campus on Bussell Highway, just north of town. Free parking on the oval. This is where every chef and grower in the region shows up. Coffee, sourdough, smoked fish, paddock-to-plate everything. It's my Saturday ritual when I'm not at the workshop. I always end up with more than I planned to carry.

If it's Saturday and you can choose only one, choose this. The whales aren't going anywhere.

Slow drive. Stop at Gabriel Chocolate (3220 Caves Rd, open 10–5 daily) for single-origin chocolate made from beans they roast on-site. Stop at any of the small galleries on the way. Cowaramup is worth a wander if you've never seen the cow statues.

Book lunch at Vasse Felix for Day 2. This is the restaurant most people put at the centre of their Margaret River trip, and there's a reason. The food is precise, the room is calm, and the art collection (the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, hung throughout the restaurant) gives an art-lover an actual reason to be here rather than the wine.

Take your time. You're not on the clock.

After lunch you'll want to walk something off. The Cape to Cape Track is 135 kilometres of coastline between the two lighthouses. You're not doing the whole thing this afternoon. You're picking a section.

My recommendation: the stretch between Smiths Beach and Yallingup Beach. About 4km one way, mostly along the limestone bluff, with three or four lookouts where you'll stop and stand and not move for a while. Park at one end, walk to the other, get an Uber or a kind friend back to the car. Or just walk it both ways. It's not far.

End where you started. The light at Smiths in the late afternoon is different from the morning light: more golden, less pencil-sharp. The surfers will still be out. The sand cools under your feet.

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

You'll have done about 200 kilometres total over the two days. Seen a cave, three wineries, a gallery, two beaches, a market, a lighthouse and 4km of one of the great coastal walks in Australia. You'll also have some idea of why the artists who live down here don't leave.

a Yallingup weekend, properly is the general version of this same trip: less art, more breadth. where I send people for cellar doors is the cellar door version if wine's where you're heading.

Forty-eight hours. That's all it takes.