Day 89 Exmouth, WA

Here we are at Exmouth and after all the worry of where we were going to pull up camp for tonight, the lovely lady at the Ningaloo Holiday Resort reception was able to fit us in for the extra night.   Fortunately for us we walked in just as they had a cancellation.  Luck is certainly on our side.  We will only be on this site for tonight and will have to move to another site for the remaining six nights of our stay.  It's not a drama.

Our drive from Coral Bay to Exmouth was just 150km and the scenery was as we had expected, flat spinifixy, black spear grass country with the occasional beast feeding out in the passing paddocks. It's still very green after the abundant rainfall. Around thirty kilometres outside Exmouth we passed the Learmonth Air Force Base. We commented that Exmouth would be the home of all these service men and women so Exmouth must be a reasonable size town. (We later learned that Learmonth is a "bare base" that is designed to be activated from bare to operational with little or no notice.) As we drove in to Exmouth this is the scene that greeted us.  

Honestly you could be at Bluewater in Cairns or Noosa Quays.  It is just so lovely but not at all what you would expect at Exmouth.  It seems to us that  it is a fairly new area as a lot of the gardens are still being established, but what a fantastic place to live if you love the water.  

The Exmouth town centre is small and compact but has all the essentials.  It also has a fantastic Information Centre just across the road from our caravan park so we will go there tomorrow and gather what information we can about the area......what to see and what to do.  Exmouth as at the entrance to the Cape Range National Park and we have a full day tour booked on Monday to visit this diverse area.  Other than that we will finally be SWIMMING WITH THE WHALE SHARKS!!!  I think we booked this when we were in Kununurra about three months ago and everything has centred around this booking.

Today is the first day of the school holidays here in Western Australia and there are children everywhere in the caravan park, riding around on bikes and scooters and playing football in the middle of every road.  This afternoon as we were entering the park after our drive, we were creeping along the road at about walking pace and we could see this kid, probably four years old, on a bicycle coming towards us.  He was riding up the middle of the road looking everywhere except where he was heading.  I said to Philip that we better pull up because the kid had obviously not seen us. So we did, but the kid kept coming towards us still not looking where he was going.  I said to Philip to beep the horn because the kid was definitely going to ride straight into us.  The kid got such a fright (by this time he was just metres from the front of the car) and yelled at us quite indignantly "Why did you frighten me!"  Kids......