West Coast Trail: PART 1

I have been gone from Auski for 4 days now- and already travelled 2400km. Taking the long way back to Perth, I followed the west coast down, stopping in Exmouth, Shark Bay and Kalbarri. A few people have told me that the coral reefs in Exmouth are as good or better than the Great Barrier Reef, so I absolutely had to check that out. I drove for about 7 hours after leaving the roadhouse in the morning and managed to get a nasty car sunburn, complete with a bare stripe where the seatbelt rested. Hot, right? (pun!) Anyway, I got to a campsite at Cape Range National Park, about a half hour drive past Exmouth in time to have a quick swim and cook some dinner. I had a great campsite overlooking the ocean and not too close to the next occupied spot, but then these French backpackers roll up directly next to me! There were plenty of other good spots but they decided that that one was their choice. Grrrr. Already sunburned, tired and cranky, this did not help my mood. They proceed to set up camp and put on some obnoxious euro-pop. Not to mention the guy sets up his backpacker shower (basically a bag with a hose that you hang from the van and shower with) and is walking around buck naked. Normally I have no objection to occcasional nudity but they were being so annoying that it was just the icing on the cake. I went to bed grumpy and woke up grumpy because my air matress had a bad leak and was half deflated by morning. I rented snorkle gear from the information center and everything changed. I have never been snorkling before, being from the middle of a continent and all. It absolutely blew my mind. It was like a real life version of Finding Nemo, with clownfish and angelfish and anemones and all sorts of cool coloured things that I don't know the name of. When I first got in the water the snorkle scared me a bit- swimming in the ocean where I couldn't touch the bottom was terrifying. After about half an hour puttering around in the shallows I gave myself a pep talk about how lame it would be if I chickened out and then finned my way over to the deep end. Amazingamazing amazing.

The next day I headed to Hamelin Pool at the bottom tip of Shark Bay. In my second year in university, my professor showed us some slides from there- there are these formations called stromatolites that are basically living rocks that they thought were extinct since 550million years go until they found some in Shark Bay in 1956. The story is that they were the first oxygen-producing organisms and in their many millions of years of existance, changed the composition of the atmosphere to allow other more complex things to develop. During the lecture I remember thinking "that place looks like the middle of nowhere- I should go some day and check out those little critters- I owe them that much". To most of the tourists going, I am sure it was a bit of a let down "Look ma! those odd shaped rocks are sitting there producing oxygen! Cool!" Due to bad timing, I had to pick between the stromatolites or driving a further hour down the road to see wild dolphins swim into a lagoon at Monkey Mia to be fed. I of course chose the algae rocks! There are dolphins all over the damn place, but there are only stromatolites in three places in the entire world!

.... To Be Continued....