Monday, June 7, 2010

Time to leave Coral Bay and head up to Exmouth. I have to admit this place is hard to leave, so laid back and easy going, it has a really nice, casual feel to it. Since it’s only 2 hours to Exmouth, Bill went for one last snorkel, and we stopped for a short hike in a canyon along the way.  We saw this big bird walking along, and found out later it's an Australian Bustard, considered to be a sort of bush turkey by the aboriginals.  We continued on into Cape Range National Park to check out some of the beaches for snorkelling the following day.  Our last stop was at a beach called Mangrove Bay, where we stopped to talk with an Aussie couple who really liked to talk. We ended up leaving just after sunset, so were forced to drive back in the dark.  Now we know why people are advised NOT to drive at night, it was nerve-racking to say the least.  Bill drove while I yelled out, "roo on the left, now the right, left, left, right again," and so forth, all the way back to the hotel.  They were literlally bounding all over the place, this area seems almost overrun with them at night. The hotel we’re staying at used to be part of a US Naval base, built here in the late 1960’s to communicate with submarines using low frequency radio waves. Literally everything needed to build and equip the base was brought over from the US, including even the concrete used to pour the foundations. We walked around the now deserted base and noted that they had pretty much all the comforts of home, including a swimming pool, baseball diamond with stadium lighting, dive shop, movie theatre, bowling alley, church, etc. The radio towers are still being used to communicate with subs, and a small portion of the base is fenced off and still in operation. We were told the rooms in our section of the hotel used to be the female officers housing unit, and still had working 110 electrical outlets, definitely not something you typically find over here.