Exmouth

It had rained heavily overnight and continued on and off all day.
I walked round to the small shopping district, had breakfast at a cafe, and waited for the shops to open at 09.00.
The holdall was still smelling and, besides smelling in the car, the airline might not let it on the plane on the way home. So I thought I'd cut my losses. Fortunately, one of the surf shops had a soft-top wheeled suitcase/holdall. I also bought a new wash-bag and left the old one and the smelly holdall outside the Op Shop which was the name for the charity shops in some towns; Alice Springs had one.
I drove round the end of the peninsula down the coast towards the shoreline in front of the Ningaloo Reef. Fortunately, at 11.45, I was just in time to catch a semi-submersible for a one-hour cruise over the reef which we reached after 10 minutes, so much closer than the Great Barrier Reef. The boat had eight windows on each side and could accommodate sixteen passengers but, on my trip, there were about eight passengers. We saw varieties of fish, corals and turtles.
I'd watched a TV programme some weeks before which said that the waters around the Reef were four degrees warmer than usual, and that this was the first time that the reefs on the both sides of Australia were being bleached at the same time. Corals could recover from bleaching but not from death.En savoir plus