I must go down to the sea again . . .

We’ve made it to the west coast, that is, a long way further west than the last bit of west coast.  Exmouth to be precise.  We did meet one bonehead in a Toyota who said “you got here in That?” nodding in a derogatory fashion in the direction of our Vin Rouge.  My response was that I wondered if his vehicle would still be running when it was twenty years old.  Grrr!

Exmouth sits on the eastern side of a promontory and is 700 kilometres south west of Tom Price.  There’s not a lot here, just a couple of caravan parks, a few shops, an impressive visitors centre and a few houses.  Tourism is its main bread winner with a bit of fishing on the side.  Its claim to fame is Ningaloo, which the west coast considers to be their answer to the Great Barrier Reef.  It’s nothing like as big but does have the advantage that coral reefs begin just a few yards from the shore.  The government created Cape Range National Park to provide a bit of control and typically they’ve gone a bit over the top.  Notices everywhere state that the are ‘no campsites available’.  The requirement is to queue up at the Ranger Station at 8am to be allocated any space that might have become available.  True to form, we rocked up about half past ten to be told that plenty of sites were free, although people had been turned away earlier.  Bloody bureaucracy getting in the way again!

So here we are in the quaintly named T-bone Bay.  First we have to set up camp.

Here’s the view from our camp looking seaward (and yes, the sea really is that colour).

Looking landwards we get quite a different but another picturesque view.

An in a different direction, another view entirely.

This is the ‘facilities’, otherwise known as the Great Australian Dunny or ‘long drop’ (work it out yourself).  It may look primitive but it’s actually quite high-tech and most hygienic.  However, Kim on a night-time excursion did find the sort of spider that could quite easily wear boots, but it wasn’t bothering anyone and so it was left alone to do whatever large spiders do in the dead of night.

Next morning we found ourselves the sole tenants of the entire bay.  The only footprints were ours and the pristine sand squeezed between our toes as we made them. 

The water was almost warm and so we took to snorkelling over the reef where we found coral heads, a variety of small but colourful fish and an octopus lurking in a hole. 

We liked the place so much we stayed two nights, relaxing, snorkelling, eating well and imbibing the occasional but necessary shandy to keep cool.  After all those corrugations and dust we felt we deserved it.  We even had visitors, a friendly kangaroo that seemed to be enjoying its herbivorous meal three metres from where we were sitting, some assorted birds making a racket in the trees and some teasing trail marks left in the sand by a goanna and some sort of snake. 

In short, a little bit of paradise.