In order to take full advantage of the day, we started again quite early today in Coral Bay and drove to Exmouth, about 150 kilometres away.
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The route from Coral Bay to Exmouth
The route from Coral Bay to Exmouth is relatively unspectacular. On the way, however, you will find an insane number of termite mounds on the roadside.
Our Exmouth hotel
Around 10 o’clock we arrived at our accommodation Sea Breeze Resort, which is about 5 km outside Exmouth. The hotel makes a not so great impression from the outside, but is really nice. As far as we arrived, a few emus ran over us 🙂
We were lucky and were already able to check in, which was great. So we were able to put all our food directly in the refrigerator. The room also has a kitchenette with cooking facilities, so that we can eat ourselves here. The Sea Breeze Resort has been April 1, 2016 no longer with Best Western. It is located about 5 km outside Exmouth next to Naval Base. From the outside it looks a bit like a motel, but the rooms are really great. We had a room in the 2nd floor. Very modern furnished and new. Everything is very clean. There is also a small kitchenette with all kinds of dishes, as well as a large fridge, microwave, toaster and kettle. The shower is excellent! The staff are very nice, friendly and helpful. The wifi is free, sometimes works better and sometimes worse. On the premises is a small pool with many loungers. Sometimes a few emus or white cockatoos look by. Towels for outdoor activities can be borrowed at the reception. The best hotel on our Western Australia trip. We can only recommend it.
The small town of Exmouth
Exmouth is a small town with about 2,200 inhabitants,which lives mainly from tourism to the Cape Range National Park and the Ningaloo Reef. The “mascot” of the place is a large red shrimp. Right next to our hotel is a still used site of the U.S. Naval Radio Station, whose transmission towers are among the highest in the world.
The Cape Range National Park
From our hotel you will take about half an hour to get to the entrance of Cape Range National Park. The route passes campsites, beautiful beaches, the Vlamingh Head lighthouse and an old shipwreck (SS Mildura) from 1907. And always take care when driving through the Cape Range National Park… “Kangaroos crossing” 🙂
The most beautiful snorkeling spots are only available in the national park … and we wanted to take a closer look at them today. A pretty good map of the national park can be found here.
Snorkeling at the Oyster Stacks
The first stop was the beach Oyster Stacks, which should be visited if possible, when there is flood, so that the corals are covered with water and you can snorkel nicely. Unfortunately, there were also strong currents,as the water has just entered the bay. Unfortunately, this was a bit exhausting when snorkeling, as you always tried to fight against the current. Otherwise, you would be completely aborted. There are many reef fish in the bay, but the visibility was not really good.
Snorkeling in Turquoise Bay
Second snorkeling stop was in Turquoise Bay. The insaneturquoise blue water alone invites you to jump quickly into the water. But also the beach with the soft white sand is very nice. The fact that the beach is also very popular with everyone else, one immediately noticed by the abundance of people. But that didn’t really bother much, because the beach has stretched a bit and so everyone could find a place. Snorkeling here is a drift snorkeling,i.e. you just go down the beach a little further down, climb into the water there, swim a few meters out and then snorkel with the current back to its berth. This worked out wonderfully and was really fun, because here we could also see beautiful things, such as blue dot rays, a reef shark, large swarms of reef fish, flute fish, Picasso pusher fish and much more.
All travelogues from Western Australia
We visited Australia for the first time during our world trip in 2015. Here we were mainly on the east coast (Sydney, Brisbane, Airlie Beach and Cairns), in the south (Adelaide, Great Ocean Road and Melbourne) and in the interior of the country (Ayers Rock). We liked Australia so much back then that we definitely wanted to see much more here. And what we completely missed was the west coast. Here we put together a great self-drive route for almost 2 weeks to get to know some of the highlights of the state of Western Australia.
» Perth – Tourist Attractions & Kangaroos on Heirisson Island (Australia)» Perth – The cute Quokkas on Rottnest Island (Australia)
» The sand dunes in Lancelin & the Pinnacles Desert (Australia)
» Hutt Lagoon & the Kalbarri National Park (Australia)
» Danham – World Heritage Drive & the Shark Bay (Australia)
» Monkey Mia – The wild Dolphins in the Shark Bay (Australia)
» Coral Bay – Diving & Snorkeling at the Ningaloo Reef (Australia)
» Exmouth – The Cape Range National Park (Australia)
» Exmouth – Swimming with whale sharks & mantas (Australia)
» Exmouth – Diving at the Muiron Islands on Ningaloo Reef (Australia)
» Perth – The Koalas in the Yanchep National Park (Australia)