As Northern as a Yorkshireman

After racing up the coast to reach Exmouth, we are now as far north as we will likely be travelling in Australia. There's a possibility of getting up to Cairns on the east coast, but I'm not sure yet whether time will permit.

Exmouth Excitement

We spent about a week in and around the Exmouth peninsula. Originally developed as a World War II military base (evident by the old bunkers, monuments, the naval base and the massive radio antennae that used to be used for communication with submarines), now a days, Exmouth relies on tourism for its survival. With the spectacular Cape Range National Park and the incredible Ningaloo Reef on its doorstep, it's no wonder the town's population almost triples during the peak holiday season.

The beginning and end of our time in Exmouth was spent in the Ningaloo Caravan and Holiday Resort generally relaxing and trying to avoid the sun and oppressive heat. The staff were incredibly nice and friendly (with just a couple of exceptions unfortunately), prices on par with most of WA camping: $10-15 pppn and very nice and clean facilities, including a 25m pool that was very nice to use to wake up in the morning (alas - it had no shade for afternoon swimming). But, by far the most important and exciting feature this caravan park has, is the little Italian restaurant called Pinocchio on the grounds. Owned and run by the wonderful Sabrina and Salvatore, there are a good variety of reasonably priced (for WA) food and drink options, but most importantly is the gelato stand. This is some of the first, proper Italian gelato I've found in WA (hand made in house by Salvatore) and even though I've yet to visit a lot of Australia, I can confidently say, that this is the best ice cream that there is on offer in this country!

Every ice cream since has had the bitter taste of disappointment.

On our penultimate day, we decided to go for a kg of chocolate,
banana and amaretto ice cream.

There is a myriad of wonderful flavours that change regularly, from the regular chocolate, ferrero, etc. to some more original mixes, such as Tim Tam, amaretto, banana and tirimisu. We went back every day (and sometimes twice) to get ice cream, and I would thoroughly recommend anyone within 100km, to visit there (which is exactly what we did one afternoon whilst in the national park).

The rest of our time in the area was spent in the National Park. We camped at Lakeside, one of the few camp grounds with a a bit of shade provided by mature trees. We spent a few days enjoying the picturesque landscapes of limestone gorges, pristine beaches and beautiful near-shore and shallow reefs. In the waters are a plethora of flora and fauna to observe from rays to sharks to coral. Unfortunately we weren't there in season (winter) for any of the big migrations (whale sharks, manta rays, doogongs, dolphins and humpback whales), but it was the right time of year for turtle nesting and hatching! We went for a walk along the beach one night to hopefully see some nesting turtles but unfortunately we only saw one baby turtle being eaten by a crab and one turtle nest being raided by another crab - so a little bit of a sad ending to that venture, but we did get a great view of the Milky Way:

I love me some long exposure

Unfortunately my GoPro decided to flood at 3m on my first snorkel, so I don't have any underwater footage, but I will hopefully post some submarine pictures from Will in the album later. There are also a number of hikes through the limestone gorges, most notably at Yardie Creek and Mandu Mandu sites - here there's lots of opportunities to see an abundance of wildlife such as fish in the creek, turtles, galahs, pelicans, osprey, kites, falcons, eagles, kangaroos, hares, goats, black tailed rock wallabies and plenty of reptiles and insects.

Yardie Creek looking west towards the sand bar

When we weren't galavanting through the bush of the Cape Range, a lot of time was spent trying to rig up some kind of shade (mostly successfully and significant improvements made each day), napping in the searing heat or failing at fishing for short periods of time. There were plenty of sharks spotted throughout the week, including one feeding on something in some very shallow water by the beach one time when we were thinking about going for a late night snorkel. Gave that one a miss that night, and so I still have all my appendages to continue this blog!

Until next time.