27/6 Wed - It started out on a gloomy rainy wednesday afternoon on the 27th of June...Amanda and I packed our bags, chucked them into the car (with several bags of snacks & etc) together with our newly purchased 12ltr plastic water dispenser and off we went. With a copy of the Australia Lonely Planet on our dashboard and a lunch stop at Subway, we commenced what was to be a north-bound trip of over 1300kms to Exmouth.
4 and half hours later and just as the sky was turning dark, we found ourselves in Geraldton...more specifically, outside the cinemas at Geraldton and so we popped in, bought two tickets for an 8pm show to Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer then cheked into a dorm at Foreshore Backpackers...we asked for a twin room but none were available...but we ended up having the 4-bed dorm to ourselves anyway.
After we'd put our sheets out and etc, we went for a walk around town and discovered Australia's best kept secret right out the back of our hostel....a Megatoy Playground Solution. Haven't heard of it??? Man you need to get with it!!! hahah :p Well yeah it was a playground, but not JUST a playground...it is the mothership of all playgrounds, including a pirate ship, a spider-webby contraption, and a quartet of balancing-act-type-contraptions, as well as smaller single units of balancing surfboards, and last but not least, THE SPINNAMAJIGGY. Yup. It's thus named. It took us both awhile to work out how it worked - amidst laughing, screaming and bumbling around and hanging on for our lives! The photo album for the trip will give you a much better idea of how amazing this playground is!!
After the movie it was pretty much straight back to the dorm and into bed in "anticipation" of our looooong stretch of driving the following day.
28/6 Thurs - We check out the main "sights" of Geraldton before heading out and these include Saint Francis Xavier Church and the HMAS Sydney Memorial. While the church was an impressive building in its own right, attention at this juncture has to be given to the memorial...which comprised of a large dome made up by 645 steel seagulls (each commemorating a sailor lost at sea when the Sydney sank) with a large propellor beneath it, two long walls with each name as well as its story inscribed, a replical hull on which the australian flag flies, and lastly...a statue of a lady with her hand on her hat looking out to sea (awaiting the ship's return).
2 hours later, we arrive at the national park in Kalbarri and stop to take in the sights at Hawk's Head lookout...where we are offered sweeping views of the river and gorge...with the colourful dusty red earth presented in a variety of colours at different sections on the cliff walls. We stop at another "lookout" and walk down to the river bank and clamber across some rocks and boulders but really it wasn't anything very exciting, especially not in a gloomy drizzle...so we got back into the car and continued the upward drive.
6 hours later we finally cross over from grey cloudy skies to blue skies and this is pretty much just as we drive across into the Tropic of Capricorn...marked by a large sign and a white line across the road. Yes we did stop for photos ;) An hour later (it's 5:20pm by now), we drive into Coral Bay and are both immediately enchanted by the beauty of the bay as well as the quiet village ambience of the little town. Petrol prices leave alot wanting though, with unleaded priced at $1.7320 per litre...we had no choice because we had to carry on upwards to Exmouth and didn't want to risk running out (we weren't even sure we were going to make it to Coral Bay!!!) so we had to fill her up and that exorbitant rate and then continue.
We arrived in Exmouth at about 7:30 and spent forever trying to find the place we wanted to stay at and then after we'd found it, to try and work out how to get in and really the funniest thing was after we'd finally got it sorted, checked in, gotten our sheets and keys etc, we proceeded to be "organised" and put our sheets etc onto our beds in the dorm so we could go walk around town and not have to come back and try and do it in the dark. In our great hurry to do so we both somehow missed something and put our sheets on beds in the wrong dorm!!! But we did enjoy our wedges and coffee as well as a really long chat and the commencement of our "Esther" study at the Ningaloo Dreaming cafe before we went back and discovered our key couldn't open the door to the dorm we'd put our sheets in..and it was humorous horror that we realised what we'd done and spent the night freezing on sheet-less beds in the correct dorm.
29/6 Fri - We head to the dive shop early in the morning coz Amanda's starting her dive course...worked out okay, she's doing it with only one other person. I book my whaleshark dive for the next day then walk to "town" for a coffee, spending the rest of the morning by the pool at our backpackers resort waiting for her lunchtime. It's actually a pretty cool pool, very lagoon styled with coconut trees and overhanging rocks.
We lunched from the large food reserve we'd brought with us from home...including peanutbutter sandwiches, mandarins and muesli bars then while Amanda went for her pool sessions I checked out the marina and the beaches along Exmouth's east coast. There was hardly anyone around...but I did see some emus crossing the road and then just walking around aimlessly. It was a lazy afternoon spent basking on the beach with my book - an army of ordinary people. Dinner was at Seachange Cafe where we shared a Fisherman's Basket (fish, crabmeat, scallops, calamari and chips) and I think we spent the rest of the night chilling in our room, playing guitar, singing and songwriting.
30/6 Sat - I had to be at the diveshop at 7am for my whaleshark dive...the shop is an activity hive with people running all over the place getting gear, paying for trips, trying out their wetties and fins and etc. Eventually after everyone has their gear sorted and bags and air tanks are chucked into the trailer at the back of the bus, we're off to the jetty where everyone lends a hand to get gearbags and tanks onto the tinny that takes out out onto the tender. At first the day seems really dismal, for a start, because we had a late start, there wasn't time for us to dive before we went whaleshark spotting...secondly, it was grey and rainy and hours went by without any whaleshark sightings - by our skipper or the spotter plane they'd enlisted. We did have several humpback whale sightings though...
An hour before the skipper had said we'd call off the search and head back, we suddenly got word that a whaleshark had been spotted and so we raced there, only to find it'd dived and probably wouldn't return to the surface. 30 minutes passed and I thought...great probably not gonna get to see one, and then we got word there was another one and as we made our way to the site where it'd been spotted, it popped up right beside us! :D Everyone was ready and geared up and jumped in on cue...and my friends, this is the precise moment where I discovered a new sport....sprint snorkelling! First we try to get out of the whalesharks way (you want to..it's like 10m long and its head is 1m wide!) and then you sprint snorkel up along its side to try and stay with it for as long as you can.
I went in for three swims with it...and pretty much by the third time I'd finally gotten the flow right, to jump in, get out of its way and get into position and then swim alongside...all without bein hyper-excited or exhausted from the sprint-swim, and so I could finally actually look at it, take in its HUGEness, its magnificence and the phenomenal design of it's patterned spotting...really if anyone reckons evolution is THE way it all began, then try and explain how the whaleshark evolved into its proportions and design and how no other fish carries the same markings.
We did our dive after that and I got to see a giant cod...which is famous in the area, it was at least 2m long (imagine how many fish and chips that could serve up!) and was just sitting on the sandbed, looking pretty clumsy! On the way back, the front tyre on our bus blew and so we hung around on the side of the road for about half an hour (bringing back horrible memories from Costa Rica - 5 flats in 10 days) and eventually got picked up by another bus.
Dinner was at Planet Burger - a little caravan kitchen that pulled up at the carpark close to our backpackers and served up pretty decent souvlakis and burgers. I had a chicken kebab with the lot (bacon, egg and cheese) and I was pretty knackered after the days "sprint snorkelling" episodes so we went to bed pretty early that night. What was a bummer though, was that Amanda's "classmate" at her dive course had been forced to drop out because she couldn't pass her diving medical examination, resulting in insufficient numbers for the dive boat to go out the following day and so Amanda had the day off.
1/7 Sun - We started the morning on a beach on the eastern side of Exmouth, watching a pretty amazing sunrise while chomping on almonds and mandarins. After the sun had well and truly risen, we head back to our room to get changed and prepped up for church...we'd decided to visit Exmouth Christian Fellowship, where we experienced a "Hath-A-Sunday" that was based on 1 Cor 14:26 and members of the congregation were invited to go up and share anything as a contribution of what they had.
We check out Whalers Inn after that, thinking there'd be live music but we just missed it and only got to see the band packing up. Nevertheless, we had a really good burger for lunch ...we shared it so Amanda's half had all the salad chucked into it and I had a double meat dosage with the sesame bits on the top of the bun cut off! We then had to tossup between sticky date pudding and a roasted almond chocolate tia maria tart for dessert. Sticky Date Pudding won... :D
In keeping with it being the "Sabbath", we went back to our room and slept away the rest of the afternoon and woke up at about 7pm and spent the evening at the Mini Golf centre...which we deemed to be a "happy place", offering up good vibes, okay coffee, good scones and great people who owned the place. I don't remember our scores but I recall it being really whacky with us taking as many as 8 or 9 shots at some of the holes...all good laughs really. It started raining not long after we had ordered our devonshire tea (for dinner) and so we stayed there for awhile, waiting for the rain to stop.
2/7 Mon - Boat wasn't going out either for lack of numbers, so Amanda came back in and we then drove north of Exmouth to check out the lighthouse - the views from there were pretty amazing, with extensive views of the coast below where you could watch set after set of waves rolling in, breaking and peeling across the bay in clean lines with gentle offshore winds helping them hold their shape. Because it was all grey and rainy, we just sat in the car snacking before eventually moving on to the Jurabi Turtle Centre.
It wasn't really the season for both egg-laying or hatchling-spotting so we jus the eggs and hatchlings faced...such as feral foxes and crabs as well as strong waves washing the sand away, exposing the nests and eating the eggs or eating the hatchlings as they make their way down the beach into the ocean.
We eventually arrive at the Cape Range National Park and after a brief stop at the tourist information centre, we head straight for the reknown Turquoise Bay to do a drift-snorkel. It was a really rewarding (though cold) snorkelling sesh, with sightings of a medium-sized spotted lagoon ray, a turtle, maori wrasses, and a whole heap of other fishes admist colourful coral.
That evening, we try to pan-fry roast almonds in a bit to have them become crisp (the roasted effect)...because we brought them raw and we didnt haven an oven at Potshot. It was quite a riot, with everyone in the kitchen eyeing us down as though we were martians...and it didn't help that we were standing there for over an hour, stirring a pan full of almonds. It was only after we decided to put a pot-lid on to simulate an oven kindda heat atmosphere that we found quick success, retiring to our room to chomp on our crunchy almonds, incredibly satisfied by our ingenuity. :D
3/7 Tues - Still not enough numbers for Amanda to head out on the boat, so we booked ourselves onto a deep-sea fishing charter and head out bright an early for my first-ever fishing expedition. It was actually pretty cool because pretty much straight after we pulled up, one of the guys caught a pretty large fish (it was a giant trevally) and although it got away, he got another one later. Our skipper was Keran and the deck-hand was Lofty - both of whom were rather amused by Amanda and I...apparantly because they'd never met anyone as happy as us out on the boat - they added that women were never happy beyond 10 minutes at a time. haha!
Hours later, they were saying it was a really bad day and they couldn't find fish on their radars...but we still managed to catch a spangled emperor (snapper) and the others caught a couple of them and a sweet lip as well. I also endured a hook in the finger when amanda and I miscommunicated about chucking the sinker overboard...no biggy though, I survived, and so did Amanda... :p I have to say though, I think it's horrible how they repeated stuck a screwdriver into every fish's head and then swished it around saying it was the best way to kill them...UGH. I wouldn't like that happening to me!
When we get back, the boys get to cleaning and filleting our fish and we meet Crusty, Lofty's female staffy. And we head to the shops to buy some butter and garlic to cook our fish with...Lofy also drops by to give us a pack of large tiger prawns (yum yum!!) that we decide to keep for the following day's meal. It is an AWESOME meal of fish with chunks of Brumby's spinach and feta "tear-and-share" loaf!
4/7 Wed - A return visit to the Exmouth Hospital regarding the bites Amanda and I have been getting (we've been told that they're sandfly bites) but the wait would've been forever and we didn't want to waste a sunny day sitting inside the hospital so we moved on and went out to the National Park again and spend the afternoon snorkelling off its beaches before finally watching a pretty sunset at Turquoise Beach.
We see a whole heap of kangaroos and meet our very first Echidna (like a porcupine) on our way back - drop into the photo gallery for a look at them and also our rather luxurious seafood dinner of prawns and fresh fish fillets.
5/7 Thu - I don't have many photos from this day apart from dinner from Planet Burger, so I'm not entirely sure what we did today, I'm guessing we mooched around doing not much?
6/7 Fri - Diving at Murion Island! Finally Amanda gets to go dive, but she finds out she's seasick (she's still adamant that she isn't!) but anyway, yeah the boat ride out there and back were pretty long coz the islands are pretty far off the coast of Exmouth so it's mildly hellish for anyone who's even mildly prone to seasickness! But we had fun all the same though, and the lunch spread was pretty good too!
When we get back, we head to Lofty's place to pick up some seafood he's packed for us to take home to Perth with us...and ended up getting some gifts to take home too! I get the front "saw" off a sawtooth shark and Amanda gets a whale tooth. We take a coupla photos out back with the hacking saw off a 16ft shark (that's way tooo big and prized to be given away) and said our farewells to crusty before sayin farewell and heading back to our room for an early night in preparation for our early and long drive towards home the following day.
7/7 Sat - We arrive at Monkey Mia in the early afternoon and find out there's no more dolphin feeding for the day (that only happens in the morning) so after spending a coupla minutes debating and checking the maps for other options, we decide to stay for a night and leave in the morning after seeing the dolphins. Seeing as its a little coastal village with not much on, we pack a whole bunch of food and settle on a grassy bit in front of the beach and spend the rest of the arvo chomping away, playing guitar and finishing up the song.
That night, we go for an Aboriginal campfire cultural experience and it was rather interesting, going bushwalking along the beach then settling around a huge campfire where we inhale loads of sandalwood smoke which the aborigines believe to have a healing quality. Our guide, Capes, teaches us loads of aboriginal local language and it was quite amazing how he'd switch between native tongue and english seamlessly and continuously. The highlight was probably when he took a raw fish and baked in on the hot coal ashes - then offerred it to us...according to Amanda, the texture was...unlike any other fish she'd ever consumed! :D
8/7 Sun - Early in the morning, we wake, pack up and head to the beach for the early morning dolphin feeding...although it's a ridiculous time of day, the beach is lined with visitors there to see the dolphins and sadly, only one dolphin appears...it's Nicky though, the same dolphin that Amanda had seen (and been talking very excitedly about the day before) when she'd visisted 7 years ago. He swims along the beach and eventually they feed him several fishes before asking us to step back so he'll leave.
We then cook up a rather large seafood brunch and eat up as much as we can before packing the rest to take back to Perth (so it doesn't spoil)...I can't quite remember how it happened but I think as we headed south towards Perth the weather just got worse and worse and we decided it'd be pointless to spend another night/day somewhere else on the coast so we made a bee-line for home and arrived not long after dark...passing sandstorms and more crazy weather along the way. But yeap...the adventure that seemed like it might never end did end...and it was pretty much..ALL good! :D
