Nowt wrong with backtracking

Good sense, otherwise known as what I want to do, prevailed, and here we are again in Broome. And now it's spring here, not winter as it still was last time. And oh my word it is HOT. Spending time in air-conditioned internet cafes has never seemed so appealing.

The West Coast really is beautiful, as I said in my last entry. But this second trip has underlined how amazingly large and empty this part of the world is. I mean I'd definitely recommend the West as a holiday destination, but unless you've got several weeks, you'd just spend too much of the holiday in your car (and frankly without your own vehicle, forget it). Of the places we'd already visited, we decided that the Ningaloo reef was really worth seeing again. So we drove straight from Perth to Exmouth, the nearest town to the best part of the reef, via a couple of roadside overnight stops. That was about 1200km. Then from Exmouth there really is NOTHING worth stopping for until Broome, 1532km further up the coast. (The coastal highway actually runs several kilometres inland, and at no point do you even see the ocean. And you'd need a pretty sturdy 4WD to get to it.) That's nearly 100 miles MORE than from Land's End to John O'Groats! On our last day of driving, we covered something like the distance from Brighton up to Middlesbrough (ah, nostalgia) - and apart from the occasional vehicle on the highway, the only evidence of human life we saw were two dusty roadhouses where you can get petrol and pies.

But who cares, now we're back in lovely Broome?! We'll be here for a week this time before we hotfoot it back (down the slightly shorter inland highway this time) to Perth - or should I say Fremantle this time, as we've already seen enough of Perth. We haven't done much in Broome so far but we've got the open-air cinema, Faye's birthday meal and a tourist-tastic sunset camel ride along Cable Beach on the agenda.
We did make it to Cable Beach for a spot of boogie-boarding yesterday, and I have to say, what a letdown. Crap waves, gale force winds and loads of mildly stinging jellyfish - not what I came back for! It'd better be better tomorrow...

I was aware of the danger of things not being as good the second time around, and luckily the Ningaloo reef didn't let us down at all - in fact it may have been even better. We had more time to play with this time, and sussed out the best places and times of day for snorkelling. Best bits were a 2m white-tipped reef shark that was chilling under a rock when we came along and gawped at it for long enough to make it move off, and a turtle that was gliding around between us and eventually came up to the surface for a gulp of air. Again, sadly no photos of the underwater frolics, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Ningaloo really is fantastic, well worth the trip up from Perth if you're ever in that neck of the woods.