Woke to another glorious morning, such a change from yesterday's wet and windy start. We did get a bit of wind during the early morning but this just helped to keep the temperature comfortable. I can't believe how hot it gets here during the day...I can understand how someone could get depleted so very quickly.
Although we've enjoyed our stay in the area we decided that it's time to move on. Camping in the Cape Range National Park is not an easy thing to achieve. One cannot book ahead but has to be at the Ranger's hut before eight in morning on the day one wishes to camp at the park but this does not guarantee you a spot because it's a bit like buying tickets to see Metallica's final tour. First in best dressed.
We had the chance to book a spot yesterday but because it was raining and windy we passed. Also we would have been placed in the overflow campsite because all the choice spots were already taken. As it was we managed to see as much as we were interested in anyway.
Both of us would have liked to go out in a glass bottomed boat to see the Ningaloo Reef but that would have meant waiting until tomorrow as all tours were booked. With today being a public holiday in Western Australia no tour was operating today.
After the usual start to the day, we did a bit of sightseeing as we drove into Exmouth.
First port of call was the turtle centre which unfortunately is not active in the cooler months but during summer visitors can witness adult turtles coming to shore to lay their eggs and also, once the eggs have hatched, the little hatchlings making their dash to the ocean. Nonetheless, it was interesting reading and learning about the life cycle of various types of turtles breeding in the locality.
Also visited the Mildura Wreck and Pebble Beach. The Mildura Wreck Beach was littered with bits of coral and shell and other interesting odds and sods while Pebble Beach had an extensive array of coloured pebbles, some large, and some not so large, some ovoid and some so perfectly spherical they could have been used for a game of marbles. Found it hard to pull ourselves from both these places.
Being on holidays doesn't exclude us from the mundane things in life and next it was off to the shopping centre where we couldn't resist morning coffee at the local health food store. Andrew had his usual short black and I had an affogatto. To accompany my coffee I had a luscious gluten free sticky date pudding with cream and butterscotch sauce while Andrew had a ricotta and raspberry slice....yum!
Next, restocked our larder (which was running VERY low) with food at the local IGA, filled up the petrol tank with fuel ($1.54 per litre for unleaded) and headed off south towards Learmonth, where we stopped at the jetty. Sadly the water was very murky after yesterday's rain and we couldn't see the marine life that the woman on the jetty said she saw before the rain.
On our way towards Highway One, we stopped for lunch at the Exmouth Fish Monger and purchased half a kilogram of Exmouth prawns which we had with bread and butter for lunch.
As you drive out (or into) Exmouth you will see hectares and hectares of reddish brown termite nests that strangely remind me of the Pinnacles.
Our next destination is to be Paraburdoo, on the way to Tom Price. But nothing here is close. It's about ninety kilometres from Exmouth to the turnoff at Burkett Road, then another seventy nine kilometres to the North West Coastal Highway. It's about now that I began to feel quite isolated, the sun beating down on everything. The earth is a deep rusty terracotta, the landscape changes from kilometre to kilometre, the sky contrasts deeply with the red...hardly a car goes by, and you realise how easily things could quickly go wrong out here.
But we did arrive at our roadside rest stop without incident at around four thirty in the afternoon, the temperature was a shock to the system when we opened the car doors. But we had the tent up in no time and I took the opportunity to launder a very small load of urgently needed clothing which didn't get done in Exmouth (because the park laundry didn't have a clothes drier). Honey Pie strung up a clothes line between the car and a bush for me and I'm hoping that there aren't any wild goats in the area the might take a liking to our clothes during the night!
Watched the sun set as we cooked a quick casserole on the gas stove and finished off our bottle of red from Saturday night. Early to bed in the hope that we can have a early start in the morning. By the way, generators in this neck of the woods is standard, so as I write this, I am hundreds of kilometres from anyway, a million stars shine in the sky, not a street light in sight, I would also swear that this is Yowie country, and if not Yowie country, definitely dingo country, yet, less then three hundred metres away is a homestead with a generator going full bore...
At this rate, when we get back home, I probably won't be able to get to sleep without the help of the drone of a generator.
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