A Lap Around Oz: Coral Bay

The Big attraction here is the World Heritage listed Ningaloo Coast

We called into Coral Bay however the caravan parks here were booked out, so its important you book if you want to stay here, the place is in a national park, so spaces are limited.

The Reason Coral bay is so popular is that is where the reef is closest to the beach, so you can easily swim to it and enjoy the view.

So we drove on to Exmouth, plenty of room here and nice spot at the RAC Cape Exmouth Holiday park.

The thought was that seeing we couldn't get into Coral Bay, we would Stay at Exmouth, and drive around to turquoise bay and do some snorkeling there to look at the Coral. ( that is the people that wanted to Snorkel).

I went into the information center, had a look at the display and immediately noted several ways you could die within the first few minutes of your swim, that's if you hadn't already drowned in the rip! Sharks and venomous sea snakes to name a couple, but I'm assured its quite safe??

So not to be deterred , we put our intrepid swimmers in (certainly not Me!), and let them have a drift in the rip!

Neither reported seeing any coral, so not sure where they went wrong??

The other option you have is to Dive with Whale Sharks, this is reportedly a good trip, but will cost you Approx $300, and quickly books out, so must be good?

So we are having a day off to make sure we are booked into some venues and be at least 10 days ahead, so we don't miss out again! Whilst doing this we decided to have a drink with a few nibbles. This was very quickly detected by the resident Emu, who was cruising around. The bird is used to people so was not easily deterred, he made a beeline straight for the bowl of crisps on the table. Butcho tried his best with some Emu whispering, which only seemed to inspire the Emu to greater effort.

The only way to get rid of it was to put all our food back in the caravan!

I feel a bit sorry for Butcho, who was only trying to protect us, but if you have a problem with Emus, I probably wouldn't call Butcho!

Being on our nations westerly most piece of dirt, the area has always had some strategic defence significance which continues.

Learmouth RAAF Airforce base, is nearby, and established in WWII with a memorial nearby, and has been recently activated in the search for the missing malasian airline plane ML370, couldn't see much activity, but there is a huge fuel dump there, if its full, looks like it would keep our air-force aloft for a few days.

And North of Exmouth on the peninsular the biggest Array of Antennas I have ever seen, The Harold Holt Naval Communications Station, apparently used for communicating with our submarine fleet.