Actually…before Exmouth we stayed at Bullara Station. Bullara is an amazing place – they take looking after caravaners seriously, with a twisted sense of humour. Some of their “ablutions” (ie showers and toilets) are designed with lots of corrugated iron, and are usually designed around existing trees. Their shower heads may be made of watering cans, their hand basins made of half beer kegs. They were also having a mural painted based on a historical photo which was interesting to see evolve. One night they had a bloke that cooked damper, told stories and gave everyone around the campfire a sample of his damper. These station stays are proving to be amazing gems on our trip.
The town of Exmouth was constructed inย 1964ย at the same time as the Harold E. Holt naval communications station to provide support to the base and to house dependent families of U.S. Navy personnel. The U.S. turned over control of the station to Australia in 1999 and withdrew all its personnel.
Nowadays Exmouth is a tourist town where the locals give you an escort down the street when you arrive (see the video). It’s on the land next to the Ningaloo Reef, which stretches from there to Canarvon along the coast. We went out on a diving and snorkelling boat and snorkelled the reef. It was a rough day out there so visibility was reduced, but we still saw a lot of the reef with its amazing fish, several turtles and a manta ray swam directly underneath us. We also saw a number of humpback whales as they migrate north.
We visited the many beaches around the area, with each being more beautiful than the last, each with swimming and snorkelling opportunities.
An unexpected delight in the area was Cape Range National Park, which contains limestone ranges and deep canyons, all with the ocean as a background.
We then ventured to Coral Bay for a few days, it coincided with WA’s school holidays so was very full and their overflow caravan parks were full. This town reminded me of places like Ocean Grove in Victoria over summer where many people visit over Christmas. The beach was right across the road from our caravan park, however the coral reef there has all died back due to last year’s storms. There are still fish around but we needed to go to 5 Finger beach to the south to see living coral and heaps of marine life.
Quobba is a small place with camp spots, when we visited it was too windy to camp there, but it made the blowhole amazing!
Video is here –> https://youtu.be/SrjTIdw3xa8?si=fiFMwvDvd-O-wpsm
AMAZING ๐ ๐ ๐ฏ enjoy xxx