Tue 22nd Jun '21 - Day 11

Coral Bay to Exmouth

 

Seb has growing pains form about 9pm and him in our bed then all night, a double bed suddenly seems even smaller. Finally a shower after 36 hours, though its saltwater (which was a deciding factor for us to stay in the other Coral Bay campsite on the way back) it still does the job. With one of our penultimate gold coins from one of the shops the kids spend 30 minutes on the bouncy pillow whilst I try an change our 4 night booking down the road from being on a different spot each night -  which is all the website would allow – to something a little less inconvenient. We find that calling campsites direct or speaking face to face allows a lot more manual intervention on the bookings and suddenly we have 3 nights on 1 spot and a last night on a different spot.

Just under a two-hour drive to our original intended destination of Exmouth (Xmouth in pronunciation, not Xmuth like the UK version). The red dirt is more visible now amongst the low shrubs but interestingly the landscape is peppered with termite mounds up to 10 feet high and also wide. Only a handful of birds of prey as we cross the tropic of Capricorn. But a lot of roadside workers as they widen and firm up the verges on this patch so when the road is narrowed you definitely notice on the steering wheel the pull and push as a triple lorry passes by. Thankfully as we are no longer on the freeway, they are much less common. As we approach Exmouth there are a number (20+?) 200-metre-long dips in the road that are potential fjords after heavy rainfall.

Each has sticks at the bottom with measured increments of up to 2m giving some indication of the rainfall that can and does occur in this region. Exmouth is bigger than we had both expected with many new houses including some alongside man made channels of water almost like the inlets of the gold coast. We swing into Ningaloo Caravan and Camping Resort and find our spot in the far back corner. This campsite like the one at coral bay is jam packed. We have clearly found the resting place of many of those making the migration north. At 22 degrees it’s again warm in the sun, but a chill in the shade, though still shorts and t-shirt weather.

We arrange to meet Deb who will look after Sienna and Seb tomorrow whilst Kate and I go on our whale shark cruise as she pops by to our onsite small playpark. She does music groups for small kids in the day, piano tutoring in the afternoon and has 4 kids of her own at high school and up so she should be fin with our two and will collect them at 7.30am tomorrow.

After a trip across the road to see the giant prawn; homage to the prawn industry set up in here in the 1960s and to the brand new information centre next door, we amble into town to collect some food bits, finally buy Seb a football we have been looking for for the last 10 days and kick it around in the park in front of the shops.

Approaching 3pm we take the van just north of Exmouth to Bundegi Beach and play snakes and ladders on the beach front albeit in the van as it is too windy outside. On the way to the beach we had passed Harold Holt US base – the only US base named after an Australian. He died (disappeared) in the sea the source of conspiracy theories. It was this base that pushed the development of Exmouth when 2,500 US army folk were based here. Now there is 8- people manning VLF (very low frequency) – 15 narrow towers that ‘talk’ to submarines in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Up to 380m tall, 3 onsite generators create 1million watts to blast out comms.

Back at the campsite it is the usual dinner, tonight diced hoisin chicken and pasta followed by yoghurt, then off to bed at 7pm for the kids and not much later for the adults.