West Coast Mission: Day 11

I would have loved to have celebrated the same way I'd celebrated my arrival in the country, that is copious amounts of disco and booze, but we were going to be spending the next day on a boat on the open sea and paying $330 for the privilege so instead we did that other thing we do so well; As little as possible on a beautiful beach.

Where The Sea Goes Dark? That's The Coral

Coral Bay is awesome but not somewhere you'd want to spend a few days unless you were working or made of money, its shockingly expensive, like, incomprehensibly expensive, as in you'd probably have to take out a second mortgage just to feed yourself for a week. The others headed to the beach while I headed to a pay phone to book us onto a campsite in Exmouth and onto a whale shark tour. I managed to get us on for the next day, a Sunday, with a small amount of coaxing and the promise of five people on the boat.

Nice one bruva.

It was weird leaving Perth and going on a mission without Kliff, we'd already done the Great Ocean Road together and then, just as we thought we'd parted company, we hit the Nullabor together with Tim and made it to Perth. But the South West Loop and the West Coast had to be done without him, him and Neil were off working on a cattle station near Carnarvon and they were out of mobile phone range so we couldn't even catch up with them when we were in the area.
Never mind though ay, everyone follows the backpacker trail, no doubt we'd bump into each other again somewhere along the way, it was never going to be goodbye with me and Kliff, just until we meet again.

I was mincing about checking out the coral and the sea turtles, making sure I didn't swim too far out in case the spotter planes mistook my arse for a whale shark and people tried to snorkel with it when Loody swam up with someone I didn't recognise on account of the snorkel mask. It took me a few seconds.

Kliff! And Neil was here too, sprawled on the beach pulling his usual Forgetting He's Ginger trick and slowly turning red.

Chillin' At Coral Bay

They'd quit the cattle station because for some reason shovelling dead, rotting cows into a heap for burning didn't appeal to them too much and they were spending their last dollars on fuel to get them up the coast to find work. We had to make it to Exmouth for 6pm to check into the site and pay for the whale shark tour so they tagged onto our little convoy and we made our way up the peninsula stopping only to take photos of the massive termite mounds and a Big Prawn which was a similar colour to what Neil had turned.

Termite Mound

On Convoy

We stayed off the goon and got an early night, we were going to be picked up at some obscene hour the next day and bundled onto a boat where we'd be expected to swim very fast with something significantly larger than us with fins and a big tail and the ability to breathe under water. The entire timing for the West Coast trip had been based around this moment and I'd been planning this for nearly a year.

A hangover wasn't an option.

written by  Koala Bear on May 12, 2007 from Exmouth, Australia
from the travel blog: Sod Off Great Big Mission Round Oz
tagged RoadTrip, LovinIt and WestCoast
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