Day 221-213 Exploring Exmouth and Coral Bay

On Tuesday, we made our way back up to Exmouth. Part of the reason for this is that Bullara Station has no drinking water, and after a couple of days we needed to top up our container and bottles.

We continued on into the Cape Range National Park and explored some of the smaller beaches. The first few that we came across weren't suitable for a swim because of the surf, although we did have fun jumping in the waves. It was hot and we wanted a proper swim to cool off to cool off, so headed to turquoise bay where we had started the kayak tour. It was very busy but thankfully most people were going for the drift to snorkel. We headed instead to the slightly quieter bay where we enjoyed a good swim. Despite being only in our swimming things, the water was warm enough that we stayed in for over half an hour.

As soon as we had cooled off, we escaped the crowds and headed back to the quieter beaches before going back to Bullara.

I'm sorry, we were having too much fun to take any photos....

On a side note, the air mattress repair hadn't worked. So we added more glue to the seal, and pumped it back up again.

Day 222

By the morning we had ended back on the floor again. So we headed to Coral Bay, mostly because the supermarket sold bits of camping gear. After buying a slightly smaller mattress, we went for a long walk along one of the beaches, and up to a lookout.

It was another hot day, but Coral Bay is only very small so the beaches were too crowded. We settled for a shady cafe instead.

As the following day would be our last full day before leaving the area, we wandered around the tour companies to see if there was anything that we wanted to do. But as all the remaining tours were very similar to what we had already done, we decided to leave it.

Instead we headed back to Bullara to catch up on some hopefully uninterrupted sleep.

Day 223

It was a cooler day today. Ok, ok, it was 21 degrees Celsius, but a comparatively cooler day. This was a primarily sorting out day. So we did another long drive into Exmouth to use the free public wifi (the random blog update that you received after a long silence) and to get a couple of days worth of food.

Because of the overcast weather, we didn't feel like exploring very far, instead we went to Exmouth town beach.

After a wander over the rocks we went back for a final damper. This only had a few differences in the talk, but we didn't have anything else planned.

A few things that we forgot to mention about Bullara Station:

1) Open air showers. There were several open air showers on the site. These are heated by a wood fired burner called a "donkey". The Donkey is lit for a few hour in the morning and evening. It was fun to have a shower outside, but a little bit cool afterwards, particularly in the evenings!

2) There is a bottle tree for guest to leave a signed bottle after their visit. These are removed after the season before the cyclones hit. They are then used around the site, for example the Bottle walk.

3) There are a lot of sculptures around the place

4) Whilst there were a couple of other tents, we were virtually the only 2 wheel drive vehicle there. There were a couple of chuckles over our little hatchback.

The Outdoor Shower

The "Donkey"

So there you go, we came for 3 nights and ended up staying for 9!

Next Time - Heading back down south!