Easyrider to Exmouth
As I left Coral Bay I felt sad. It's the first place in Oz i've really felt like I could spend a long time at. I decided before I came away that it'd bad for me to spend too much time in any one place. It's a big world and I should keep moving to make the best of my time. I've met too many people who get stuck in just one place and miss out on everywhere else. I call it my Littlest Hobo rule.
If I didn't need to get back to Perth to sort out my flights to NZ, I probably would've broken it.
I was back on an Easyrider bus completing the last leg of my tour. We were driving to Exmouth, a town which sprang up to service the US VLF station which was built there to communicate with the US Nuclear Submarine Fleet in the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the cold war.
On the way, we passed hundreds of termite mounds on either side of the road. The driver started reeling off facts about how long they take to build, the termite queen, the natural remedies the aboriginal people found they could get from them. I never thought termite mounds could hold my attention for so long. Sometimes I feel a bit like I live in the Discovery Channel. That's interesting, I thought. Then realised I wouldn't have found that out if I was still in Coral Bay. The Littlest Hobo was right.
After a couple of hours we got into Exmouth. Travelling down 'Nimitz Street' towards our hostel, you could see the VLF station and another 'listening post' building from miles away.
We drove right passed it on the way to Turquoise Bay. I got a couple of pics for any Merlin nerds who like this kind of thing.
No? Alright then, just Ashley.
Turqouise Bay is a gorgeous little bay (still on Ningaloo Reef) about half an hour out of Exmouth. The water is of course a beautiful Turquoise in the bay, but theres also a strong current which takes you all along the shore without any effort at all. Stupidly I left my camera on the bus so I didn't get any pics. But think 'paradise' and you're not far wrong.
What happens in paradise in Oz? That's right. How does mother nature want to kill me today? You have to walk for a while down the beach and then get in the water, so it can take you back towards the bay. This is because the current just off the bay leads about 2km out to sea! The current is so strong over the reef that when I floated over a huge shoal of fish and tried to swim back towards them as hard as I could. I still found myself being pushed backwards. I made sure to get out before I got to the bay.
Swimming in the bay was great though, there was a turtle that kept bobbing his head up and down so we started trying to swim with him. Everytime he came up for air he'd realise we were there and speed off.
One of the blokes on the bus called Chris, I'm sure I recognised (we never did get down to where from.) As we were going through the whole where do you live/what do you do etc, I said I used to work for a private company inside the BBC World Service. After a couple of seconds, he said
"Oh yeah? Have you heard of Merlin Communications?"
"That's them" I said,
"Do you know someone called Emma? Shes my sister. Emma Bailes?"
"Yeah, I know Emma. I like her, shes one of the few people in HR I never had an argument with!"
Small World eh?
We finished up the day at sunset, at a lighthouse overlooking the Exmouth Penninsular. Easyrider graciously provided a load of champagne (which we graciously drunk) to top off the tour. A fitting end to a superb West Coast adventure.
