Walpole
"Forty metres up, the walkway sways slightly with your steps, and the tingle canopy goes on in every direction."
A hushed inlet town where a steel walkway lifts you into the canopy of ancient tingle trees so wide a car could once drive through their trunks.
Walpole sits between Denmark and Albany on the south coast, tucked against an inlet system so calm and mirror-still on a good morning that the water barely registers as separate from the sky. It’s a small town, more a service point for the surrounding national parks than a destination in its own right, but the forest just outside it is one of the more genuinely startling things I found in the southwest.
The Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk is the headline attraction — a six-hundred-metre steel walkway that rises gradually to forty metres above the forest floor, running through the crowns of red tingle trees that exist nowhere else on Earth outside this small corner of Western Australia. The walkway sways just enough underfoot to remind you you’re not on solid ground, and looking down through gaps in the canopy at the forest floor so far below produces a specific kind of vertigo that has nothing to do with cliffs or heights in the usual sense — it’s about being inside a tree’s own airspace.
Below the walkway, the Ancient Empire boardwalk loops through veteran tingle trees at ground level, some with fire-hollowed bases wide enough that a car was famously driven through one in a promotional photo decades ago before conservation concerns closed that particular party trick down. Standing inside the hollow of one of these trees, looking up at bark that’s survived multiple bushfires and centuries of growth, does something to your sense of scale that the walkway above can’t quite match.
The inlet itself is worth a slow afternoon — I rented a canoe and paddled out from the town jetty into water so still it doubled the paperbark trees on the far bank, and the only sound for an hour was the paddle and the occasional splash of a fish. Nornalup Inlet connects out to the ocean through a narrow channel called the Blackwood-style “Point,” though I never made it that far before the light started going and I turned back.
When to go: September to April for the driest, most pleasant conditions on the Tree Top Walk. The inlet is calmest and best for paddling in the early morning, regardless of season.
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