Whale Sharks, Cockroaches, Bakery Truck Drivers, Oh My!

One thing people forgot to tell me was how LONG it takes to get anywhere in Western Australia. There are very few towns (unlike the East coast) and each one is about one street long. On July 3rd I took an excruciatingly long bus ride (15 hours overnight) up to Coral Bay, which is not even half way up the west coast. The weather was perfect!! Sunny and 28 degrees every day. Because it was school holidays everything was booked solid so I had no place to stay the second night. It was either sleep on the beach or pay $120 for a crappy hotel. Well... I chose option 3, which was to catch a ride at 4:30am on the bakery truck to Exmouth with a sketchy guy named Smithy. It was quite the ride. Smithy looked like he was a Hell's Angels biker, with a long beard and chains. The house music blasting the whole way as I tried to sleep was an added bonus (at least it was house!).

The morning I got into Exmouth I had booked 2 dives at the Navy Pier, one of the best pier dives in the world. It was pretty amazing: giant, colorful fish everywhere. It really was like jumping into a tropical fish tank. I swam within 2 feet of a 2m long White-tipped Reef shark!! I wasn't scared at all. We also swam next to a giant yellow sea snake and a 1.5m Wobbigong shark (they are related to Leopard sharks). I bought a $50 underwater camera that apparently could be used several times, but when I went to rewind the film after the dive it hadn't rewound and is probably ruined now.

The next day I went on another dive to the Ningaloo Reef. Awesome!! The best dive I have ever been on! I swam through caverns and caves and there was incredible surge (the waves from above tossed us back and forth). I finally saw my first clownfish in the wild. The coral wasn't as impressive as the Great Barrier but the diversity of fish was amazing. Then we got back on the boat because they had spotted our first Whale Shark!! It was quite hectic, pulling off our gear and quickly racing into our snorkel gear and then diving into the deep ocean to see the biggest fish in the world. I didn't know what to expect and how BIG this shark was going to be. I jumped into the water and looked down into the ocean, and suddenly there was this giant shark heading right in my direction with its mouth open. I remember screaming into my snorkel "holy shit!". I would like to say that I was really brave snorkeling with a 20foot long shark, but actually they are completely harmless and only eat plankton and small fish. We swam within a couple meters of the shark and because they don't swim very fast we swam along side it for a while. The first one we saw had a huge chunk taken out of its dorsal fin and its side, most likely from a Tiger Shark. Remember when swimming in the tropics: spots are good (whale shark), stripes are bad (tiger shark). We saw 3 more whale sharks and then went looking for Humpback whales, which we saw 2 of. We also saw dozens of manta rays feeding near the reef.

I took the bus back to Coral Bay (booking my hostel accommodation well in advance) and just chilled on the beach for 5 days. I suntanned, read, and snorkeled, in that order about everyday. I hung out with a really cool guy named Ian from England most of the time. The Ningaloo Reef is right off the beach so you can literally just jump in the water and swim to the reef. Coral Bay is so beautiful; I recall staring at the turquoise water for a while with my mouth hanging open because it was so beautiful. One night I was cooking a stir fry and went to go stir it and discovered a little extra protein in the pan - a cockroach!! It was crawling in with my veggies and just about freaked me out. I carefully removed it (crushing it causes all its little eggs to come out and produce more cockroaches) and decided that the food wasn't ruined because of the heat.

I am back in cold Perth now: 5 degrees this morning! The bus took 15 hours to get back from Coral Bay. Along the way I tried to ignore the occasional loud thump in the front of the bus. Apparently the bus hits about 5 kangaroos a night :( I talked to the bus driver about it and he said that 25 'roos in one night was his record. It's like they are proud of it or something.

I booked my flight back to Sydney on Monday the 14th. From there I will look for a job somewhere on the East Coast. I have met heaps of people who have given me ideas of where to look. I'll write next in Sydney. Until then... keep happy and healthy.