The West Coast
Trip Start
Jul 05, 2007
1
41
48
Trip End
Dec 24, 2007
Kalbarri,
Australia
Thursday, November 8, 2007
There's a fantastic coral reef just off the coast at Exmouth and Coral Bay. I've spent a lot of time snorkelling round it. I've seen manta rays, a sea snake and lots of turtles, which is cool. I've amused myself by persuading a "blond" woman from Leceister who is on my tour that the species of turtle that they have out here is "teenage mutant ninja". Which she has now written up on her own blog for all of her friends back home to see.
The tour guide hit a fresh low at Coral Bay. We had a free day. I went out to the reef with some of the group. The tour guide went gambling. She told us to be at the hostel in time to cook at 7. She wasn't there at 7, so I went to the internet room which overlooked the swimming pool. A 8 o' clock, I saw a girl, fully clothed, "bomb" into the swimming pool. It was the tour guide - steaming drunk. She was unconcious by half past 8, so a couple of us in the group cooked. There were only two of us who were sober, so I took Christina, a 72 year old German lady aside to discuss which of us should drive the 400 kilometres which we had to cover the next day.
From Coral Bay we headed down to Monkey Mia. Mokey Mia is famous, not for monkeys, but for being the place to swim with up to 15 dolphins. Not true. You can see one dolphin being fed. They preent you from swimming because they want to keep the dolphin wild. Personally, I can't see how aiming to keep the dolphin wild tallies with feeding it every day, but there you go.
After Monkey Mia, we headed down through the beautiful Kalbarri National Park, which has loads of photogenic gorges, and then onto the Pinnacles. The Pinnacles are a spectacular set of rock formations, which point out of the desert, into the sky. This specatacle was ignored by my tour group, who spent an hour trying to find the most phallic-shaped rock that they could.
10 days with the tour group has taken its toll. It's much harder work than the NAO. I'm looking forward to a few days to relax in Perth next.
