Marc & Nora ROUND THE WORLD 2005/2006 - Join us!

Coral Bay (Marc Writes)

The drive from Carnarvon upto Coral Bay isn't so far but we decided to stop overnight on the way up anyway. We found a legitimately free campground in our 'CAMP Australia' guide book and it told us that it was 90km south of Coral Bay. The genuine free campgrounds are really nothing more than gravel car parks with a few picnic bencehs and if you are lucky a bush toilet. Anyway as we rolled into the car park we spotted a couple sat having a beer outside their parked caravan. We parked, grabbed a beer ourselves and wandered over to say hello. The couple with the caravan turned out to be the nicest Aussie couple, Graeme & Sandra, you could hope to meet. They wouldn't accept no for an answer as they offered to cook us dinner. So...we said Yes. Obviously it didn't take much arm twisting. In fact we had breakfast for dinner...fried eggs, bacon, beans & toast....mmmmmmm. Oh yeah and then they gave us chocolate pudding and custard for dessert......luxury! We sat a chatted for about 4 hours before we said goodnite and that was that. In the morning we woke to find a note fixed to our windscreen from Graeme & Sandra telling us that if we ever needed a bed or a feed in Perth then we should give them a shout...how nice is that!?

We drove the last 90km up to Coral Bay and parked in the visitor car park and got the coffee pot going. Just as we were having our morning coffee a couple of other backpacker vans turned. We got talking to the guys from both vans and in fact the two vans were travelling together as a group and there were 9 of them in total...3 french, 3 dutch, 1 German, 1 Swedish and 1 Canadian. We hung around with these guys for the rest of the day and went in search of the famous coral bay reef shark nursery. Basically the in shore reef forms a nice and peaceful lagoon into which the mother reef sharks leave their young to basically hang out until they are big enough to go out into the main reef and fend for themselves. The cool thing about this is that the water is only about 50cm (20") deep and you can wade into the water with about 100 reef sharks swimming around your legs. They are still quite young and therefore quite small (probably 1m to 1.5m long) but to be surrounded by them in the water is still pretty scary! Having said that they were clearly more scared of us and they would simply turn and swim away if you approached them.

The guys in the other 2 vans checked into a campsite for the nite and Nora and I decided that we would eat with them but sleep somewhere else...somewhere free obviously! We actually found a parking spot just outside the campground which made it handy for carrying our food and stuff straight into the campsite so we could cook it and also made it quite easy for us to use the bathroom etc. So after a good feed and a 6pack of beers later (in my case) we decided to hit the sack. After a few beers it never takes me long to reach deep sleep and so I was oblivious to the fact that the national park rangers were hammering on the van and shining their torches through the windows at 2am. eventually a terrified Nora managed to wake me from my beery slumber just as the rangers had returned for the 3rd time at 3am. It was easy for me to say "just ignore them and they will go away" as I'd be asleep again in a matter of seconds...and in fact I was. Poor Nora though was petrified and in fact didn't sleep at all for the entire night cos she was just waiting for them to return again and again. It turns out though that they gave up in the end and left us in peace after about 4am. At 6am Nora woke me and we drove about 20m to the legal daytime car park.....cheeky I know but when you're on a tight budget you have to do these things.

So we spent another day at the beach and tried to snorkel with the sharks before setting of for exmouth which was another few hours drive to the North.