Sydney :: Australia
Australia as a foreign country
Places: Perth, Exmouth, Denham, Monkey Mia & Coral Bay
Coolest thing I did: While swimming with the whalesharks is the big drawcard I actually think I liked swimming with the Manta Rays better. They move slower.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can pretty much drive as fast as you want in WA. We were getting overtaken doing like 130km/h on the highway.
We'll start with the postcards - Ningaloo Reef exceeded all my expectations. Situated 1200ish kms north of Perth is a couple of hundred kms of fringing reef which feels almost untouched when compared to the crush you can sometimes feel diving off Cairns or Townsville. There isn't much tourist infrastructure on the peninsula yet and that makes it feel a remoteness you can't get anywhere on the East Coast of Australia anymore. You come up here for the experience of swimming with the whalesharks, but there's just so much more than that to it - if it swam in the water I probably saw it over the course of a week. One day we were out diving and we saw humpback whales tracking along at about the same speed as the boat. On that same day dolphins decided to come right up to the hull and swim along with the boat as we charged out to the reef, as if it's something they do all the the time. You have to keep reminding yourself amidst all this blue sky and 29 degree days that it's the middle of winter.
The plan had always been to spend as much time diving out on the reef as possible, but on arrival it became obvious that the record highs of the Aussie dollar aren't doing very much for tourism in this part of the world. We only managed to get out diving on two separate days in the whole week, mostly because they have trouble filling up a dive boat at the moment. The plus side of that of course is you're going to be pretty sure there isn't going to be the kind of underwater traffic jams you get lining up for the Blue Hole in Egypt or diving off the pontoons in Cairns. Of the diving my favorite was the Navy Pier, which added to my limited diving on man-made structures and gave me my first night dive. I really have to get around to getting that Advanced license one of these days.
The Navy Pier is an accident of history. During the Cold War the Yanks decided that Exmouth would be a good place to put VHF antennae so they could communicate with their nuclear subs out in the Indian Ocean. Being Yanks, they also decided they should build these antennae (which are stories tall) in Texas and ship them out to Australia, but Exmouth being pretty remote they also had to dig a channel 14m deep and build a pier to unload them on. About 40 years later the reef has grown over it and it's become a favorite haunt of Grey Nurse Sharks and Wobbegongs. What's very unique about it is the fact you can drive right up to the pier in a minibus, get geared up and jump right in. Everything you want to see is quite shallow and 50 mins later you climb up a ladder like getting out of a swimming pool. All these massive diagonal struts are covered in new life and diving it by torchlight on the second dive added another interesting aspect to it all. Highly recommended.
The main reason anyone comes to Exmouth in winter is for the whalesharks, these big placid filter feeders who can be seen in several other places, but nowhere with the clock regularity of Exmouth between March and July. You can't dive with them, for the simple fact that they don't sit still very long, and you're only ever going to see them on the surface when they're hoovering up krill. When they dive, they dive deep and fast so being at 10m or so would be fairly useless anyway. It's quite a production as it is. You get on boats that go cruising around the reef waiting for light aircraft to spot the sharks and tell them where they are heading. This is possible because on a good day there's like 20m visibility under water and the things are massive - the biggest one we swam with was clocked at 6m long. You get geared up for snorkeling then the boat drops you off in front of where the whaleshark is heading and you kind of let it pass you and try your hardest to swim along after them. And it's not easy, they move at some speed and have a habit of turning at random however they do let you get within a few metres of them and you get a feel for just how big they are. I felt sorry for the flabbergasted backpackers we kept meeting who simply couldn't afford to do it while they were there, it was one of the highlights of the trip for sure.
Manta Rays are the other big beast you snorkel with off the back of a boat, and that was much easier to deal with due to it being far less popular. The same light aircraft tell you where they are going to be, but instead of charging along at top speed the mantas tend to just swim down a few metres and do backflips while they are feeding so you get to see right down into them as they do it. They truly are miracles of form following function, they just seem to open up like big sacks and stuff themselves with krill or whatever it is they are eating. Unlike the whalesharks there aren't that many rules around following them around so you can generally swim out there until you run out of energy.
On the peninsula the last town we stayed in was Coral Bay, which is pretty much a single street which faces onto what may well be the most attractive beach I've seen anywhere in this country, and I've seen a few. It's a long flat beach which is protected from fishing, meaning you can walk right down to the water, plug into your snorkeling gear and then drop off 3m or so into the water and then there's about 1km of reef right there. I saw turtles and sharks right off the beach, which is pretty rare anywhere else in the world. One day I was actually lucky enough to see a stingray swimming around in about half a foot of water while I was walking along the beach. There's so much life up there you don't even need to be in the water to see it apparently.
Fishing is a big deal in mid-WA and it seems to be the big dividing line between the "tourists" (ie, anyone who can't butcher their own roo) and the rest. Due to the massive amounts of money sloshing around over there most people seemed to be in a massive 4WD towing a huge fishing boat and were genuinely puzzled as to why anyone would be in this part of the world without either. More that one old grizzled man told us they remember a time not very long ago when Coral Bay was a bunch of shacks on the beach and they had wanted it to stay that way. Apparently because Coral has now got a hotel, a hostel and a few shops, which seemed to be a sign that the whole thing was now overdeveloped and ruined. I wonder what they'd make of Bondi. I mean when your town is like 80% caravan park by surface area it's hardly the Gold Coast.
The Western Austalians were an interesting bunch - it truly does feel like a different, far more prosperous country over there. Denham is the town you stay in when you go down to Monkey Mia to see the dolphins feeding on the beach, and it's a lovely one street town facing Shark Bay, however it knows it's target market. It's got a boat ramp about every couple of hundred metres and brand new covered sinks for cleaning all those fish you just spent all day catching. Our neighbours in the motel were an extended clan of mining types from Karratha down on holiday to do some fishing and driving around in 4WDs. One look at the rental car (a Lancer, which after a 500km drive south from Exmouth had collected some kind of little bird in the grill) and we pretty much dropped heavily in the estimates of all the menfolk. With hindsight there is a lot of Shark Bay you can't see in a normal car, but they were more perplexed by how we were going to go fishing without a boat. The womenfolk, however, seemed OK with us, though the matriarch of the clans rambling story about how she never understood how e-tags work after her one trip to Sydney pretty clearly illustrated we're a different race from them.
On a pretty perfect morning we drove the 20-odd kms from Denham to Monkey Mia to see where the dolphins come in to feed and though I'd seen it before on TV, there's nothing like dolphins swimming right up to you in knee deep water because they're hungry. The rangers are pretty controlled in how many fish they are allowed to give out so there's a bit of jostling to get in a spot where you get to be one of the lucky few. I tended to get annoyed when old people got to do it instead of little kids - you had your life already, let the kiddies get some memories to carry with them forever.
Grey nomads are probably 90% of the tourist population in this part of the world, quite a few of them put their names and place of origin on the back of their caravans, quite often with a UHF frequency for a CB radio - I guess so you can talk to them. Mark however decided that UHF 14 was the pensioner swingers channel, but kind of backtracked when he followed that thought through to it's logical conclusion.
When we first got to Denham we met probably the world's most depressed German barmaid in the pub, who seemed to not like much about Denham but had been living there inexplicably for 2 weeks. Her answer to the question of "sum up WA in one world" was "fine". Which doesn't sound too bad until she clarified it with "fine if I smoke, fine if I drink outside, fine if I...". She told us about Wild Wednesday, the big karaoke night when the whole town goes a bit nuts. Our neighbours decided to meet us down there and when the good folk of Karratha go out they don't muck around. I was driving first the next day so I stuck to beer but Mark allowed him to get into rounds of Jagerbombs with them, however they don't seem to have Red Bull in WA, so they used Monster energy drink instead, which is the pleasant colour of radioactive wee. By the time dozens Oz rock classics had been mangled there was dancing on the pool table (including the spectacle of one bird smashing her head on the overhead lights) and eventually planking. I don't know what it is with bogans and planking, but they get drunk and then it's plank, plank, plank. At one point they were lying face down in stacks on the pool table. Something to behold and I'm not holding my breath of seeing that in the Ivy any time soon. Unfortunately my night was a big overshadowed by becoming the target of the only creepy gay German in the village, who we later dubbed Klaus von Arserape. I'd have been OK with talking to him if his breath didn't smell like he'd been recently brushing his teeth with dog poo. Kind of got me down a bit.
The only advice I'd have for anyone traveling in this part of the world is to make sure you're wallet is fully loaded - nothing in WA is cheap. Petrol is $1.80 a litre, fish and chips from the takeway is about $20 and we foolishly bought two pints of non-generic beer which turned out to be $23. I don't know how the backpackers do it these days, we did see a few of them but mostly they seemed to be hiding out in the hostel just in case they were tempted by a $9 ice cream or something.
Though we didn't spend much time in Perth on this trip I did find it interesting to return there after more than a decade away. I used to go visit for work during the mid-90s slump in the mining industry and it felt like a dozy little town. It certainly isn't that any longer. While the mining industry has done nothing to bring down the price of a box of cereal it's certainly spruced Perth up a bit. The Subiaco hotel now has tablecloths (!) but you can still find that bogan spirit if you look a bit. After downing a few mega expensive pints while watching the sun set from the balcony of the Cottesloe Beach hotel on our last night, we decided to duck into the far more packed Ocean Beach Hotel to see how the Sunday night before a public holiday was shaping up (Foundation Day, which didn't actually seem to involve women wearing too much makeup). While we were there one of the big questions in ex-pat London life was answered - why does the Walkabout chain of Australian pubs not actually look like any pubs in Australia? We found out that it does, and the Ocean Beach is it's model. That same feeling of complete feralness the Walkabouts is alive and well in WA, but even then I couldn't quite make the connection until I saw a couple of plastic pint glasses submerged in vomit in the bathroom sink. Makes you want to sing the national anthem, really.
I think the Perthverts and other WAians found us a strange as we found them, with our lack of 4WD and fishing boats and our flinching at $9.50 pints of Draft. WA really is a foreign country, but a lovable one.