The last three days have been pretty good: we spent almost all the time on Turquois Beach in the Cape Range National Park nearby Exmouth - a beautiful white beach with blue water and loads of colourful fish and generally had a good time with little or no arguments.

To be honest one has to admit: Exmouth is a dump, but it does have a few very nice beaches, snorkeling areas and diving spots nearby, with Turquois Bay probably beeing one of the nicest beaches in Australia. When I'm finally able to upload photos again you'll see what I mean - the water is clear and blue, the sand a bright white and it's really quite beautiful. Besides there aren't many people there, at least not compared to the masses you'd find on a beach like that in Europe. One thing that's quite special about Turquois Bay is that there is a very strong current that goes behind the reef, parallel to beach for a few hundred meters before turning to the open sea. That's pretty cool because you can simply lie motionless in the water, snorkel and watch the fish and corals and the current will carry you all the way to the middle of the bay. At that point however you should get the hell out of there, else the current will wash you out to the open sea and you don't have a chance to swim against it. I suppose your next stop would be East Timor or Singapore if you got carried out there. And since there are lifesavers or even phones nearby you'd almost certainly drown before being rescued. Though I did hear about one guy who got rescued after about three hours. Well, they wouldn't have been able to rescue me after that amount of time. But I suppose it wouldn't be Australia if there wasn't some element of mortal danger to it. Oh, and btw: I did snorkel again!

There is fish down there!

The girls convinced me to give snorkeling another try. And somehow it was much better than before. Maybe it had something to do with that I could walk into the sea and try snorkeling in the shallow water before venturing out to the corals. Maybe jumping into the middle of the ocean as I did in Coral Bay is not the best way to learn snorkeling if you are not comfortable in water in general and can't swim very well to begin with. Anyhow: I managed to breathe more air then water this time and discovered that this makes snorkeling a completely different experience! I saw tons of big and small and colourful fish. Esther even saw a manta ray and the day before Esther and Sarah had seen what was probably a shark. At first we all thought it must have been a (vegetarian) reef shark, but we later found out that what they saw was about 1.5 meters too large for a reef shark - gulp. Yesterday Sarah even saw a whale shark, when she went on a whale shark snorkeling tour. It's pretty pricey at 320 AUD and you can't even be certian to really see a whale shark, but she did and she said it was awesome. Apparently the whale sharks (who thankfully enough are vegetarians as well) are the worlds largest fish and she said seeing one in the wild and swimming next to one was worth every cent of the money.

More wildlife than you want...

While travelling to and from the beaches we got to see a fair bit more of native Australian animals - actually a fair bit more then we wanted! We passed by about 20 or 30 wallabies who were sitting no more then two meters from the road and about as many cadavers of dead wallabies. We also had to stop frequently to let Emus cross the street and even saw some wild horses. Emus are funny, btw: They even come to town to try to steal food. And for me it's really weird seeing a big ostrich-like animal walk past me as I'm having breakfast. Unfortuantely we didn't see any giant sea turtles, as it is the wrong time of the year, but if you get here in time you can see them lay their eggs or even see the little turtles hatch.

Off to more adventures

Today we are off to the "Karijini National Park", a few hundred kms to the southeast - there ain't any Australia left to the north and west from here :-). We heard very interesting and some scary stories about Karijin, but will take a look anyhow - or because of it. We did for example meet a girl who had to spend the night in a rock pool since she couldn't make the six meters jump to the next one and the rangers wouldn't save her in the dark. Great. Oh, and the next town where there is a hostel is home to old Asbestos Mines. Gotta love this country :-).

On the web:
Whale Sharks