Departed our overnight stop around 7:15 and were in Exmouth by mid morning. We booked into a town campsite for 2 nights though we are hoping to move into the National Park once we know when the car can be fixed. Then we can get on with the reason for being here, the Ningaloo Reef.
Even though it is Sunday, we managed to find a hardware store open and John purchased the necessary items to do a fairly durable cardboard, double sided tape, plastic and duct tape cover over the back door on the car. Very neat!
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| Hope the repair is waterproof. |
We took the car for a drive and it seems to be holding up well so are hoping we can at least drive around the Cape Range NP area until it can be fixed. There is a repair shop in town which is fortunate as Exmouth is a very small place and extremely isolated. Tomorrow morning John will contact the repair shop after speaking to our insurance company. We hope the replacement window can come from Perth and not Sydney or Melbourne but even so the minimum time before the work can be done will be 4 or 5 days. Must look on the bright side, we could have been stranded somewhere awful.
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| Bleak outlook at WWII radar bunker with Vlamingh lighthouse in background and Ningaloo reef in the distance. |
Today has been cloudy and very windy and the area is quite unlike my expectations. Rain is forecast for tonight and tomorrow so we managed to get the rear of the car underneath the caravan awning which should offer some protection. Hopefully no worse weather is on the way - this is an area prone to cyclones and the highest wind speeds on the Australian mainland have been recorded here. There was a cyclone a couple of months ago which has unfortunately destroyed much of the infrastructure in the national park including some of the campgrounds.
There is a bizarre system in place for allocating campsites in the national park. Bookings cannot be made on line or by phone - only by queueing up at the park entrance on the day you want to start camping. The ranger arrives at 8:00am to allocate sites but to get a good choice I am told I need to be in the queue by 6:15am. All going well with planning the repair I can do this on Tuesday and we should be able to stay in the park for about 5 days before coming back to Exmouth for the car repair.
Whilst driving through Exmouth I came across 2 big 'things' to add to my photographic collection. Ironically the real whale sharks, at up to 13 metres, are much bigger than this concrete one of only about 4 metres.
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| Big prawn |
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| Big whale shark |
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