Out of the Tropics
Out of the Tropics
Next morning in Coral Bay, I wandered down to the ocean and flopped into the water to wake myself up. The sun was shining, the sand was warm but the water was nice and cool. The snorkeling in pretty good in Coral Bay I’m told and the hostel had free snorkel gear to borrow but I’d got a little toasted by the sun at Ningaloo so I gave it a miss. My very pale skin can’t hack it even with liberal application of sunscreen.
I knew my Pepsi-Max friends from the road were here in Coral Bay so I wandered around to find them and say hello. They had invited me to spend Christmas with them in Coral Bay if I was around and here I was two days before the big day. When they saw me the offer was made again and I ws really tempted to stay. Alas I had no reception for my mobile phone and the only phone cards available were the kind that require me to keep depositing money into the payphones so to hell with that, whats the point of buying a phone card if you have to pay again to use it? I knew there was coverage in Carnarvon 235km away so I decided to go there instead. I don’t think they’d speak to me again if I didn’t call home at Christmas.
So that evening I took off out of Coral Bay to knock some of the distance off the journey. I wanted to get to Carnarvon and get some food and a place to stay before everything shut up and I was unlikely to do that if I tried to do it all in a day. The food in Coral Bay was insanely priced, a cucumber was $5, a can of beans was nearly $3 for example and although I wanted something nice for my Christmas dinner I wasn’t that desperate. I only had about 4 hours of light left so I stopped and camped on a dried up river bed about 65km out of town. Soft sand makes a nice place to sleep.