How’s it going everyone?
It’s been a little while since we’ve updated our site; Easter, I think? Since then life has been going well. We’ve been on holiday, travelling 1700 kms north, up the coast of Western Australia to the Ningaloo Reef.
It was a great holiday. We vacationed several days with Jenny and Dave, friends of Nancy’s who travelled from Goulburn, NSW, Australia. The four of us toured Perth, Freemantle, Rottnest Island, the Pinnacles, and Monkey Mia together. There was nothing but sun, sun, sun and heat, heat, heat for the entire two weeks. Nancy was in her element!
The boat tour of the Swan River at Perth was bright and bold with a great skyline, deep blue skies and hundreds and hundreds of sailboats on the river with every different colour of spinnaker imaginable scurrying about the Swan. I can’t figure out how they all stayed clear of each other! From Perth we wandered to Freemantle but eventually ended up on Rottnest Island (yes, named after rats which a nearsighted captain mistook the native quokkas to be) where we took a bus tour, bicycled, and walked about. Excluding essential vehicles, no motorized vehicles are permitted on the Island. It was very picturesque.
Heading north, we stopped in and drove through the Pinnacle rock formations. That was surreal. It’s a desert within a desert with hundreds of acres of sand and thousands of odd rock formations sprouting from the sand. Can’t say that we’ve ever seen anything like it! We pushed on to the Shark Bay World Heritage site; camping near/on the beach in a caravan park in the town of Denham. While there, we popped over to Monkey Mia which is really a resort famous for dolphins that come ashore daily......and yes, a pod of them came ashore at 7:15 a.m. to be fed and twice after that in the morning. Most importantly, Nancy got to feed the dolphins.
After leaving Shark Bay, we pressed northward travelling through Geraldton and Carnarvan and finally arrived at Coral Bay. Boy, the landscape is flat. A curve in the road is a cause for breaking out the champagne and celebrating! Coral Bay was great. There are only a 120 permanent inhabitants. Many of them live in shabby tin caravans/trailers/houses because of the high cost of living. We had a great time and snorkelled all the time. You could simply walk up the beach, go out 50 meters or so and view a diverse range of underwater wildlife and coral. Nemo would have been right at home. For us bumpkins in Alberta it was quite novel and we both really enjoyed it. The thousands of fish were every color and shape imaginable, many were bright to the point of glowing, particularly when you got close to them (which you easily could). We also took a full day “nature/snorkelling” tour on a catamaran and it was wonderful. The skipper was a great host and a good cook – yes, Nancy had fresh fish again, this time cooked on a barby attached to the stern of the cat!!! The snorkelling was wonderful and, in addition to fish and coral, we saw turtles and even saw a reef shark underwater.
After reluctantly leaving Coral Bay, Exmouth was only 150 kms or so further north. There, we snorkelled with WHALE SHARKs!!!! Now that was an awe inspiring experience. You are on a boat on the outer reef and a spotter plane locates the sharks. After radioing a sighting down to the boat it’s full steam ahead. Everyone’s trying to get wetsuits (if they use one) and snorkelling gear on, the excitement is rising, dive masters are trying to go over the protocol for swimming around the sharks (you can’t get any closer than 3 meters – like you’d want to!!!)| Then suddenly you get the signal that’s time to go (and quick) and over you go...the shark is coming toward the boat but you’re not sure where. Then all of a sudden the biggest fish you’ve ever seen glides placidly into view and comes toward you (GULP)....and you try to swim alongside of it. We got to do this SIX times (the maximum for the sharks). For some unknown reason only male juvenile sharks congregate at the Ningaloo. But the two teenage sharks we dove with are 6 meters long....18 - 20 foot babies!. After that it was huge banana prawns and nibblies and salads for lunch and then snorkelling at a really cool spot in the inner reef. Along the way we saw dolphins, turtles and a manta ray (with a 3 meter wingspan). What a great day!
The next few days we snorkelled along some of the beaches in the Ningaloo Reef National Park, particularly one aptly named Turquoise Bay. There one uses a lateral current along the shore to help you snorkel. You just walk up the beach several hundred meters (or more if you want) hop in the water and swim out to the coral and simply let the current float you along the beach to the sandbar where you can hop out and walk back up the beach and do it again. It’s like being in an aquarium. You just have to remember to get out in time because the current turns out to sea and away you go (hahahahaha). It was a blast.
Well, I’m sure we’ve forgotten a bunch of stuff so we’ll attach a bunch of pics in the next few days.
Cheers/Love Boyd and Nancy
