Exmouth: The Beginning of the Middle of Nowhere

I finally made it to Exmouth. Now, given that I was traveling by plane, and not by covered wagon, or camel, or, god-forbid, foot, this shouldn’t be that big of an accomplishment. True, there are only about 4 flights a week up here, and true, the airport is simply the most adorable little airport that I have ever laid eyes on, but still, it is a 2 hour flight in a relatively straight line in the comfort of a (fairly) modern jet. However, this does not take into account that the gods did not want someone on that plane to get here. If I was a more superstitious person, I would have cut and run. As it was, I stubbornly refuse to believe in my own mortality, and just kept up my running mantra of “this is not how I am going to die” (more on that later). Funny that this follows my last entry waxing poetic about the joys of flying in Australia; while my enthusiasm remains undiminished, the irony does not escape me. 

'Modern'

See, they got a big storm in Exmouth. And by big, I mean 240 mm of water in 24 hours. I don’t know what that means in real numbers, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but it sounds like a lot, and everyone certainly treated it like a lot. We took off on Saturday, despite the dire warnings of rain, got halfway to Exmouth, executed a pretty turn, and flew right back to Perth. The little Beanie Baby of an airport up north had closed due to extensive flooding. From the way people were talking about it, I think the town of Exmouth almost got washed away. To the everlasting credit of the airline I was flying on (I refuse to give open endorsements; let’s just say that this airline is the opposite of a porn star), they not only put us up in a swanky hotel in the heart of Perth, they also gave us free meals and cab vouchers to and from the airport. America, once again, your airlines are being put to shame. I decided that this meant I should take a vacation from my vacation, and spent an indulgent afternoon going to the gym, luxuriating in a steam room, ordering room service, taking a bath, and walking around in the hotel bathrobe because I could, dammit. I then attempted to occupy the entirety of the king size bed while I slept, because on the rare occasions when I am confronted with a king size bed, I feel a moral obligation to make sure that no part of it feels neglected. I also used all the complimentary tea bags in the room, and stole all the bath products, as payback for them tempting me with absurdly expensive minibar items that I didn’t really need. If I had had room in my backpack, I may have taken the bathrobe. Sadly, it didn’t fit, and I thought they might notice if I tied it to the outside of the pack like a rain flap. 

Bein' fancy

Our plucky little band of travelers arrived back at the airport Sunday morning, full of hopes and dreams of perhaps actually making it to Exmouth this time. Everything seemed promising - we had our little safety demonstration, we were ordered to turn off our electrical devices, all the babies on the plane started their pre-takeoff caterwauling - and then the plane admitted defeat and turned back to the terminal. A problem with the fuel pump injector. Not a clue what that does, but it has fuel in its name so I would rather it was fully operational. After a delay while the ‘engineer’ ‘looked at’ the thingymajigger, we got queued up for take two. This time, a passenger got violently ill, and we again headed back to the terminal while a truly remarkable number of medics and assorted other personnel flooded the plane and we listened to the dulcet sounds of someone hurling in the bathroom. We all had a nice panic that maybe this was something communicable, until the rumor started circulating that the gentleman in question was just supremely hungover, and then we all snickered behind our hands while he was escorted off the plane. Take 3. We actually take off…and turn around and come back to the airport, because that pesky little fuel pump is apparently still not working. So much for the engineer. At this point, we’re a pretty tightly knit group, with a somewhat fatalistic outlook. The girl in front of me is debating the merits of renting a car and driving. The lady across from me is starting to voice concerns that the flight is cursed. The gentleman behind me can’t stop laughing. They remove us from the plane, and we all have time to sit in the terminal and think about whether we really want to go to Exmouth. Needless to say, when we get onto a new plane, roughly 4 hours after we were initially supposed to take off, we’re all a little skeptical. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief once the beverage service starts, as if this act of hospitality confirms that we are actually going to make it this time. I was a little disappointed that we were not welcomed with champagne and balloons when we finally arrived in Learmonth airport. Instead, we just wandered in to the little toy poodle of an airport (one room, that serves as terminal and security and baggage claim and rental car desk), were strictly warned not to take pictures (it’s an active Royal Australian Air Force base), and told that many of the roads were still closed due to flooding. 

Shh...don't tell them I took a pic of the airport!

So that is why I am quite pleased with myself for actually making it to Exmouth. 

The rest of my time on this remote spit of land has been much less adventurous than getting up here. I treated myself to a rental car and drove down the coast 120 kms to the beautiful, TINY town of Coral Bay. I have clearly been much too influenced by my Southern California upbringing, because I really do worship at the altar of the automobile. I was so pleased, so ecstatic, when I got behind the wheel of that car, I thought I was going to burst through the windshield. I have bought all the hype, and I truly did feel free, unstoppable, the wind on my tail fins and the sun gleaming off the chrome and all that. It helps that the drive down to Coral Bay is stunning and desolate. I don’t have the vocabulary, I’ve discovered, to describe this landscape, so please bear with me as I bumble along, and confuse my dunes with my mesas and my limestone with my sandstone. In any case, picture an endless sea of red and brown, rising and falling gently in small mounds, covered in low scraggly bushes and threatening grasses that seem nearly gray close up but in the distance are almost sparkling in their greenness, with an occasional gum tree standing sentinel on a lonely hill, all unfurling below a sky that is so blue that the clouds seem lost in it, and right through the middle of this runs a solitary road, no buildings, no outposts, just a two-lane road disappearing into the horizon, shimmering in the heat. The drive is something like that. Even here, relatively close to civilization, and nowhere near the oppression of the outback, it is palpable how quickly this land could kill you, just swallow you up without a sound. I saw 2 cars in the 2 hours that I was driving, and there is not a hint of cell service or any of that nonsense. It would be a long, hot, thirsty wait if your car broke down. On the plus side, there are massive quantities of sheep, frequently in the middle of the road, so depending on your speed, agility, and bloodlust, those could keep you going for a while. 

Yep, I was standing in the middle of the road. Nope, this wasn't a problem.

I spent nearly 2 days in the town of Coral Bay, although town may be a bit of an overstatement. Sans tourists, I believe the population is about 30. I am not exaggerating. The town consists of one road, along which is arrayed a hostel, 2 (!) caravan parks, a resort, a dive shop, and a general store. That’s all you get. God forbid you run out of gas in Coral Bay, because I’m fairly certain that even as basic an amenity as a petrol station eluded this tiny hamlet. I’m not even sure how Coral Bay managed to come into being; the obvious explanation is the fantastic beach and easy access to Ningaloo Reef, a fringing reef that runs for 250 km up the northwest coast of Australia, but given that the rest of the coast seems equally superlative, and completely uninhabited, I’m not sure what really set Coral Bay apart. In any case, it’s a lovely little town, perhaps assisted by the fact that it’s just such a shock to find it there at all. There are barely any signs, you just pull off the ‘highway’, such as it is, onto a smaller road, bump along for some 15 km, and then suddenly, oops, there’s a caravan park and people are walking down the middle of the street and there’s sparkling blue water off to your right. I continue to be amazed and pleased every time I see the ocean up here; it just seems so out of place. All this arid, desolate scrubland, rust-stained and thirsty, and then boom! Water and white sand beaches and the general feel of a tropical paradise crossed with a deserted island. It never fails to be a pleasant surprise. 

My wee little tent

Much to the delight of the part of me that likes to pretend to be self-sufficient, I camped for my two nights in Coral Bay. This was fairly cushy, as I had a car to keep all my things in, a nice shower block not 50 meters away, and a restaurant and pub at the resort. But still, camping! Roughing it! I continue to be inordinately proud of myself when I manage to set up my tent in less than 10 minutes. My tent is a cute little number, just a quarter dome big enough for one person, and quite comfortable. It looked like a dollhouse compared to everything around me. Australians are very serious about their camping. Without even getting into the size and complexity of the caravans, the ‘tents’ are a wonder to behold. They look like structural installations; I without a doubt know people that are currently living in smaller NYC apartments than those tents. They had multiple rooms and foyers, antennae sticking out of them like command posts, and quite frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to find full beds inside of them. I tried to explain to my tent that size doesn’t matter, but I don’t think it believed me.

My main purpose for being in Coral Bay, other than proving to myself that I was capable of camping, was to dive on the Ningaloo Reef. This reef is host to over 200 different kinds of coral, and is rich with all the associated sea creatures that like warm, protected waters. Having learned my lesson on the Great Barrier Reef, I doped myself up with delicious sea-sickness tablets and got on the boat. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that sea-sickness tablets make me dumb. Not sleepy, as I had been warned, just very very stupid. I don’t think I could have told my right from my left if asked (perhaps not a great example, I’m not very good at that under the best of circumstances). It’s a miracle I remembered how to breathe at all, let alone breathe underwater. Luckily by the second dive of the day, the tablets had worn off, and I was capable of actually enjoying myself. I’ve already waxed pretty poetic about the Great Barrier Reef, so in an effort to not repeat myself, I will just say that this was the same, except better. Now, before people panic about this sacrilege against the Great Barrier, let me say that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of dive sites on the Great Barrier Reef, and I only saw 3 of those, 3 that are among the most frequented by tourists. I am sure there are parts of the Great Barrier that could blow Ningaloo out of the water (no pun intended, amazingly), but for the few sites I visited, Ningaloo simply looks a little less ravaged, a little more pristine. I saw coral that looked like alien beings, like giant vases and bowls, like the bony fingers of a polydactyl witch wearing blue nail polish. Sweeping schools of fish, moray eels peeking out from rocks, octopi pretending that if they didn’t move they would be invisible, and reef sharks swimming around with their mouths open while tiny fearless fish cleaned their teeth. All of this, less than a kilometer from shore.

Underwater photography is hard.

Turtle!

While I was in this trip for the dives, the actual name of our tour was Manta Ray Interaction. Between dives, we got to swim with manta rays, which in case you aren’t familiar, are bloody big rays, about 4.5 meters (I’ll do the math on that one for you, about 15 feet) from tip to tip. ‘Swim with’, however, is a very subjective term. These things are fast, powerful, and effortlessly graceful. Human beings, particularly in the water, are not. So when you put 10 humans on the back of a boat, and command them to quietly enter the water and swim as fast, but as silently, as possible towards a spotter who is hovering above, and attempting to keep pace with, the moving manta ray, you have a recipe for disaster. A loud, sloppy, damp disaster. Bodies went flopping into water, fins and elbows went flying, the ocean around the boat became a sea of bubbles, people thumped through the sea like dogs missing 3 legs, frantically swimming back and forth attempting to find, catch up to, or keep pace with this giant, magnificent creature who must have wondered what the hell it had done to deserve this. What does a ray have to do to eat in peace? Visibility wasn’t great underwater, so we must have looked perfectly ridiculous as we stuck our masks in the water, swam frantically for 5 or 10 meters in one direction while trying to dodge the fins of the person in front of us, popped our heads up like awkward aquatic groundhogs, realized that the rest of the group had fled in a different direction, and hurriedly splashed off that way, only to realize that we were wrong once again. It was like synchronized swimming being performed by chubby blind 3 year olds who didn’t know how to swim. That said, once I realized that it was pointless to try to keep up with the ray, and much easier to just float lazily on the surface and watch it swim in gentle figure-eights below me, the experience was quite lovely. It is powerful, and humbling, to watch something that large loom out of the murk below you and glide by with such astonishing elegance. Especially when compared with the slapstick ballet that was occurring on the surface. 

No pictures of floundering snorkelers, sorry.

After the simple beauty of Coral Bay, I have to confess that I wasn’t quite ready for Exmouth. Not that Exmouth is much bigger, it’s only about 2500 strong, but it is certainly the more well-known, and therefore touristy, town. Even by Australian standards, Exmouth is a baby - the town came into being in the 60’s, after a naval base was put in and they realized that they needed some place to provide basic amenities for the military families that had been stuck on this side of nowhere. To my complete delight, the military base is named after Harold E. Holt, who, as any reader of Bill Bryson knows (Bryson wrote what I have considered my Australian bible, In a Sunburnt Country), is the prime minister that went for a swim and promptly disappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to him. Sadly, the base is not named for him because of this particular ability to render himself extinct, but because he was instrumental in its founding. My first night in Exmouth, while I still had the wonder that is a car, I camped just past this naval base on the very edge of the country, beneath a light house and WW2-era radar tower. I took advantage of my mobility to drive a little ways along the coast, pulling up on beaches that allowed me to pretend that I was a castaway. I have trouble fathoming how empty this land is, how devoid of people. I have visited 4 beaches in the vicinity of Exmouth, and I have never shared one with a single person. While on the beach closest to town, a fair number of 4 wheel drive vehicles blew past, but no one invaded my little sun-bathing sphere. The beaches up by the lighthouse were exceptional, isolated and prehistoric, with huge craggy rocks rising up like mountains, complete with vast gorges and crystalline pools, but all done in miniature, not more than 3 or 4 feet tall. There were endless swatches of flat, smooth gray stone, holding countless tide pools, each teeming with life. I still get pretty excited every time I see a shell move - while I logically know that little animals live in them, it’s hard for me to shake the feeling that they’re just decorative, ornamental objects. I spent far too long watching minuscule hermit crabs make the difficult journey across inches of sand. On one of the beaches, there were even fossilized imprints of long dead coral in the rocks. And all of this, not to mention miles of white sand beaches dotted with bits of coral and stunning shells, jutted up incongruously out of that red waste. It felt like another planet. This, to come full circle, was where my mantra changed to “this IS how I am going to die”, because between the threat of snakes in the scrubby parts, and stonefish, cone shells, and jellyfish in the ocean-y parts, not to mention the utter lack of any human being within shouting distance, I was too scared to really touch anything lest it unexpectedly hit me with a toxic cocktail. Needless to say, I survived. 

I wasn't afraid of my buddy Mr. Crab here

Today, I returned to Harold E Holt Naval Base to dive beneath the Navy Pier. This is apparently one of the top-rated dive sites in the world, and I can see why. Access is very limited, due to the fact that it’s still an operating military base, which means that it has an air of exclusivity, and, for whatever reason, there is a vast congregation of marine life around the base of the pier. I have seen a few reef sharks now on my dives here, but never this many, and never this close. Sharks circling, dozing on the bottom, drifting past, completely uninterested in us but so close you could touch them. There were also giant groupers, we’re talking 2+ meters here, that were so friendly they would come and bump into you, the biggest damn ‘crayfish’ (seriously, this thing was bigger than my head) I’ve ever seen, and a wobbegong shark, which is like an oceanic carpet, just chilling on the ocean floor, looking exactly like a bunch of algae-covered rocks. Schools of fish would just enclose you, and everything was completely fearless. It almost felt as if the fish were eyeballing you, posing for pictures if and only if they decided they liked you. 

Tomorrow, I am trading sharks for snakes, kangaroos, and whatever else the outback wants to throw at me. I am heading for a cattle station in precisely the middle of nowhere. It’s a little odd to contemplate going completely off the grid. To a large extent, technology has made this trip simple, both practically and emotionally; I wasn’t really aware of how invested I was in my phone until faced with the fact that it’s about to become a glorified paperweight. But somehow the outback wouldn’t be the outback if I had access to Facebook. 

'Straya (that's the Australian version of 'Merica)

For my going away dinner, I was offered some freshly caught fish by my new roommate. She had caught, gutted, and filleted this fish (a Spangled Emperor perhaps? Whatever it was, it was bloody huge), and now chucked it on the communal barby. The men in the grilling area looked on in wonder, and one older gent leaned over to me and said confidentially, “That’s what we call a keeper.” I think I just saw the essence of Australia, and it’s 5’2” and sunburned. Not a bad send off before I head into that Red Waste.