To Exmouth and Cape Range

Try this: find yourself a map of Australia, a pin, and a piece of string.  Fix the string to the pin and put the pin in the map through ‘Sydney’. Now draw an arc with the string ‘til you find, the furthest  you can get from Sydney as the crow flies. 

Can’t be bothered?  OK then, I’ll tell you;  It’s Cape Range NP just below Exmouth, which is, of course, where I’m writing this update from.  We are also pretty much halfway around in terms of time – three months gone already!  I did feel a bit melancholy when I realised this.  I mentioned it to Jules and she said, “Excellent, we’ve still got three months to go”.  Probably sums up the differences in our personalities perfectly.

It terms of actual kilometres travelled, the keen sighted will have noticed that I stopped recording daily distances travelled fairly early on.  Deadlines and statistics seem to have become increasingly unimportant.  We leave when we leave, travel ‘til we stop and stay ‘til we feel like moving on again.  It’s rare that I know what day of the week it is anymore.  That said, I can report that since leaving Manly Vale in August, we have travelled just short of 16,000 km’s and that may well be around half way in terms of distance as well... so each kilometre we do from here on in is taking us closer to home.

Anyway, time for a quick update of the last week or so.  It will have to be quick though as I’m being plagued by enormous flying ants that are crawling over my lap –top screen like some kind of funky screen saver.

We left Karijini and headed to the mining town of Tom Price. We only stayed on night, but did take a tour of the Rio Tinto mine of the same name.  It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude of these types of operations until you see them up close.

Next we headed North to Millstream Chichester NP.  It’s not a particularly well known national park, but is a great place to spend a few days relaxing. The temperature touched 40 degrees, but we didn’t care as we were camped on the banks of the Fortescue River and alternated between sitting in the shade of a tree, reading, and jumping into the river to cool off whenever all that activity became too strenuous.

Finally we headed West again, via the dirt road to the mining town of Pannawonica until we hit the coast -road again and then onto Cape Range NP (with a quick stop in Exmouth for supplies and coffee).

Ningaloo Reef runs just offshore of Cape Range NP and has some excellent snorkelling and fishing.  Unfortunately, we had some big winds on the day we arrived. Even the most beautiful white beaches and aqua-marine water is difficult to appreciate when even a quick walk along the beach results in a layer of skin being sand-blasted away.  On the second day the wind dropped and what a beautiful place this became.  We snorkelled every morning and fished every afternoon.  

At first the Ospreys that often hunted by our beach camp were catching more fish than we were, but once we found our mojo, we managed to pull out a few good sized fish.  In the end we stayed for five nights and could have probably stayed longer.   

To be honest, it was only  the need to replenish our food, drinking water and alcohol supplies, and the desire to wash (in something other than saltwater) that made us leave.