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Published: April 29th 2007
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Once I'd managed to sleep a night without being woken by dingoes, snakes, german teenage backpackers and all the other rustly little so and so's that keep your adrenalin levels high enough to cook on it was time for a leisurely yomp of another 600 or so kilometres to Exmouth (pronounced Ex-mowth, not Exmuth as we're reliably informed). Our last night was spent in Tom Price, place of very little except a teenage kangaroo on speed and the odd backpacker infringement. As one does, one turns up at ones campsite, picks ones spot (the best obviously, because lady Debbie deserves nothing better), and then the german teenage oiks from the last place that kept us awake pitched up and flagrantly pitched down virtually inside ones own edifice. Her ladyship was noticably annoyed, so I sent Jeeves down to give them a talking to and applied a soothing gin and tonic to calm her nerves. Later that night while the band of oik was preparing its collective dinner and contemplating how to be more hormonal, more hungover and more unlikeable, one of these Mrs Roo things bounced up to the tent, de-pouched a young master Roo, and had a good old
back scratch and dust bath not 3 metres in front of us. Meanwhile mini-marsupial decided to strech his legs by doing laps of the campsite and rang rings around us for 5 minutes. I don't think I've ever seen anything move quite so fast. He quickly got knackered and hopped back over to mum for a ticking-off and a spit-wash during which time I was frantically trying to get the bloody camera to work. For some reason it refuses to chose a focal point when it's dusk so apologies for the fuzzy pic, but apart from the electronics this was something I'll never forget.
Westward ho to the port of Exmouth which didn't seem all that when we got there. Quick stop to book a dive and snorkel trip the following day and a dazed trudge round the corner to put the tent up again. Another long drive, another tent pitch, another animal visit, you know how it goes. Tonights visitor was six foot of dodgy looking emu in search of peanuts, so we kept the back of the car shut (it contains all the peanuts and was getting an eyeballing from the overgrown chicken). As it wasn't
Jamesh Bond
Sex on legs!! getting dark the camera decided to play up again, but this time it didn't matter because superchook was a regular visitor; it's quite disconcerting to be trying to make a cup of tea in the morning with an interested dinobirdosaur behind you.
Morning one saw us on the good ship CantRememberTheBoatsNameSorry with Mark and Rebecca, an englaussie couple along for the dip off the Muiron islands. I hadn't dived for a few years and was a bit trepidacious at first (does trepidacious exist as a word? -someone at work look it up for me, I'm too busy enjoying myself and your internet access is free). I bubbled off twice with Mark, Rebecca and Monica while Bed did the mermaid thing on the sundeck and didn't comment on my attractive wetsuited appearance once, which hurt, frankly. Punishable by a future fake shark warning I think, especially as she's responsible for the comment on the picture too. If you go diving on the west coast of Oz, and find yourself in Exmouth book the
DiveNow crew if you can. The friendly bloke who picks you up in the morning isn't the bus driver, he's the company (apologies Steve, you need
Paradise
Sans rubber to wear a 'Mine!' shirt, smoke cigars and be grumpier), and he'll deliver you to Snowy, the most laid back man on the sea, who'll put you in the capable hands of Monica, the hardest working instructor/guide/chef/all-around-nice-person you'll have dived with. All in all a great day, although a new company they're an absolute gem, and hopefully it won't be long before we're back on the boat with them.
Rebecca and Mark what we done met on the boat turn out to be normal people what like wine like what we do so we hook up later on that night for booze, bbqs and banter. Cool people, doing a years camping tour of Australia before they ship out to blighty, may their english weather prove less painful than our collective hangovers.
Not having had enough of the wet stuff we headed off to Turquoise Bay the following day to play in some rip currents. For those of you who haven't experienced a rip it runs parallel to the beach and can be a nice walking pace or akin to being spat through a washing machine with a rocket up your ar...snorkel. Anyway this ones friendly (ish) so you
In the drink
Anyone seen a whale shark? No - me neither! chuck yourself in the sea at one end of the beach, float gently over lots of coral and associated fish types, exit at the sandbar (or you end up having the aforementioned firework experience), run up the beach and do it all over again. For some reason the fish took a dislike to Debbie and me on the first run and tried to remove lumps of leg on the way, unsucessfully mind, because they're all tiddlers. Can't say I blame them really, imagine if a gang of fish were constantly staring through your front window wearing stupid masks and peeing on your lawn.
The main draw for Exmouth is that its the season for
Whale Shark migrations, every year from May to September the (mostly) juvenile males swim up the east coast and head for Indonesia. What you do is hand over a very large amount of money, park your snorkel equipped butt on a boat and wait for the spotter plane to call in a sighting. Then the boat takes off and drops you right in front of the biggest fish in the sea which completely ignores you and swims right on by. Quite impressive little nessies, the one we saw was only about 6 metres but they can grow up to 18 metres. However, we only got a 30 second sighting before he got fed up and dived. He popped back up later on and a few other boat loads of human got a look then he got permanently annoyed and dived for good. Sooo, on the upside me and the Debquanaut got to see a Whale Shark in the flesh, but on the down side we paid 10 dollars a second for the experience. This was cheap, we'd gone out on Whale Shark Festival day and had 20% off for the privilege. Bit of a lottery, Rebecca and Mark didn't get to see one at all the day before, but the operators run a no-sighting policy by which you get free subsequent day(s) to try again so they're coming back next year. Its probably a good idea, its going to take a year for the blisters to heal up on my feet, cheap hire fins have acid-etched holes in most of my toes.
We left the next day having had an argument with the nice campsite people. They insisted we'd not paid our last night, we insisted we had. We paid them eventually on the basis we'd forgotten what day or date it is and had accidentally stayed one day more than we'd paid for. Oops.
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