Part 7 (Exmouth)

The drive from Shark Bay to Exmouth is long, about 8 hours, and there's not a whole lot along the way to break up the monotony of the Australian scrubland. Probably the highlight of the last leg of our roadtrip was this:


That's right, we crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn, which meant that officially speaking we were in the tropics! I can now say I've walked, driven, and flown over the lower Tropic of the earth.

We checked into our accomodation, Blue Reef Backpackers Caravan Park, late in the afternoon and it was HOT, probably about 95F, and as none of us felt like doing much of anything we settled down into a combination internet cafe/bookstore/tour company/car rental joint and spent a couple hours in happy, air conditioned surroundings checking up on news from home and browsing through what books had managed to find their way up into a secondhand bookstore in Exmouth, Western Australia. Our caravan park was actually quite nice, we met some fellow UWA exchanges there and hung out for a while, plus took the chance to enjoy the free outdoor movie on offer - Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was possibly one of the top ten worst movies I've ever seen but at least it held our attention for a couple hours.

Next morning, we set out bright and early for snorkeling. Exmouth is situated on a big pensinsula that is dominated in the middle by the Cape Range National Park - the only "mountains" of any note I've seen since coming here, not terribly impressive in the grand scheme of things but still imposing enough that unless you have a serious 4-wheel drive you have to go all the way around to get to the other side of the peninsula (which we did as that's where all the good snorkeling is). Our first stop was Turquoise Bay, aptly named as it has totally gorgeous blue water and an awesome current that runs parallel to the beach so you can basically just lay on your back and get drifted over fish, coral, and a whole bunch of marine life. I got especially lucky and saw a sea turtle, but even if I hadn't it would have been well worth coming - fish EVERYWHERE, plus some other weird things like sea cucumbers. Around lunchtime we headed to the next beach down the road where I saw a pretty decent-sized reef shark, maybe 6 feet or so (it bolted as soon as it saw me).

By that point we had to head back to Exmouth because Noam and I were going on a tour the next day (Friday) and we had to pay and make final arrangements for that. The tour, which started bright and early around 730 AM, was a little pricey (about $200 AU) but it went all day and it was absolutely worth every penny. Our tour guide rolled up in an absolute monstrosity of an ex-army vehicle that you could probably have driven through an active volcano and come through unscathed. This was ideal for conquering the terrain of Cape Range, where we went first.


We went on two roads; the first was on old riverbed at the bottom of a canyon


Then we went along the top of the canyon, where we had morning tea.


And on our way back out, we stopped by the local seafood company to pick up some prawns for lunch. They were delicious and decently sized, but not quite as big as the whopper they had out front...