2006/08 Australia trip - Quobba Station |
|||
We were moving on south towards Coral Bay and there appeared to be a shepherd’s track that would take us there directly 
rather than going back along the corrugated road we’d come in on. The track was a single lane and, going along the back side of the dunes, was mostly sand, so the drive took a while. In places it split up into northbound and southbound tracks, but still pretty rough, and we were vibromassaged for about three hours. Mostly the scenery was dull: grasslands, termite mounds, and sand dunes, with lots of sheep, and the occasional emu and insomniac wallaby. In a few places though it was possible to drive to the beaches, and these were still gorgeous with all the colours of the reef in the water.
We stopped in Coral Bay to pick up some glue for my glasses and to use the Internet. I hope the messages I sent were intelligible – I don’t know as I couldn’t read either the screen or the keyboard. Coral Bay is a small place: just caravan parks, motels, and booking offices for dives and trips to the reef. The place had been recommended to us by another camper, but I suspect that she was more enthusiastic about the reef than the town itself. By this time it was too windy to enjoy a trip out to the reef, and the campers in town looked to be packed like sardines, so we moved on.
Back on the main road again, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, so we were no longer in the Tropics. Just to underline this, the wind got colder and we had a few rain showers. We were running out of daylight and dodging cows, rabbits, and a cat when we took the turning along the coast to the Blowholes, as we thought there was a campground there. We didn’t find it but we ended up camping at the nearby Quobba sheep station. This was very different from Ningaloo, as this time we were at the homestead, with sheep in the pens, tractors running, dogs everywhere, and a few other campers. In addition, we were now south of the Ningaloo Reef. Without the reef’s protection, the coast is pounded by the breakers coming in off the Indian Ocean, and we could hear them thundering onto the rocks just a short distance away.
Friday July 28th
Although the campground advertised “hot showers”, we found in the morning that the instructions for the showers began with “gather firewood at least 2km from the homestead”. The hot water came from a “donkey stove”. Sandie took a cold shower and thought it was probably mostly sea water as soap didn’t lather.
I took a walk down to the beach but decided that this wasn’t a swimming beach. The breakers were roaring 
in and crashing on the rocks. The waves were different heights and coming in from two directions, so the results were very unpredictable. I felt very exposed walking on the beach and retreated to the top of the dunes, only to find that these were already wet, even though the tide was still coming in. There must have been at least one monster wave to cause that. The waves have 5000 miles to build on their way across the Indian Ocean from South Africa, so maybe that’s not surprising.
We drove back down the Blowholes coast, watching the spray flying from every beach. There was a big sign just before the lighthouse that said “King waves kill”, so getting off the beach had probably been a good idea. A few days later an American tourist was washed off the rocks on this coast and drowned.
There were a couple of strange sequels to our stays at Ningaloo and Quobba. There is a controversial move by the government to turn this whole coast into a World Heritage Area and to regulate camping. We saw a TV program back in Melbourne that was discussing this subject, and it contained interviews with the people we’d talked with at both sheep stations, including Billie Lefroy, the old lady at Ningaloo who’d come out with her walker to collect our camping fee.
The other sequel had to do with the wreck of the Stefano, back in the 1800s. The ranger at Yardie Creek had recommended a book about the Stefano’s crew, who had been washed ashore just south of Ningaloo. I later read the book. The Stefano had been a Croatian sailing ship heading for Java but it hit a rock near the reef. The coast has no fresh water and little food, and all the crew that made it to shore died of thirst or starvation, except for two young men that were saved by the aborigines and brought to where they could be rescued. The book was researched and written by a grandson of one of the men and he mentioned being helped in his research by the same Billie Lefroy, the lady at Ningaloo.
We could sympathize with the crew of the Stefano. We’d seen no water crossings at all as we’d driven down the coast from Exmouth, and the area is extremely dry. At Carnarvon, just south of Quobba, there was a sign warning of little water for the next 400K and suggesting, of course, that we should buy water there before proceeding. We thought we already had enough on board to keep us alive.