Exmouth

Hi everyone, we arrived in Exmouth on Wednesday, a 403 km trip from Onslow.  The wind caught the van a few times on the way & wobbled us around!  It is now school holiday time so we are staying until the 16 October, then we will move on to Coral Bay for a week.  The weather has cooled down a lot (only 26 degrees- we're freezing!) and it is very windy. Exmouth is a nice little town on a peninsula sticking up like a thumb.  The town is on the east side, it is about a 20 minute drive to get to the "tip" then there is a road down the western side overlooking the Indian Ocean. We went for a short drive down the western side yesterday, & will explore it more in the next few days. We are now 3366 kms from Darwin & 1270 kms from Perth. Considering our slow crawl up the east coast, we are now like greyhounds!  

Exmouth Marina- there are lots of vessels worth serious money docked here

Heading north from Exmouth to drive around the peninsula, a lot of emus around

View from the Vlamingh lighthouse lookout. This is looking north towards the tip of the peninsula with the Indian Ocean on the left.

WW2 radar station.  Exmouth was the southernmost point in Australia to be bombed by the Japanese.

The wreck is quite close to shore, the is a photo of it coming up!

Whale watching- we saw about 5-7 whales smacking their tails & also breaching. Took about a million photos, but too hard to capture from shore.  You will have too trust us, the white blob in the middle is not a wave, it is the splash from Moby Dick!

Wreck of SS Mildura.

 Hard to see- on the land there is a naval submarine communications base, lots of huge white thin aerials linked together by fine cables.  The next picture  is an overhead view Graeme copied from the Google Maps

View from above of communications base. It is massive.

Onslow WA

Hi everyone, here we are in remote Onslow,by the sea.  It is a small dusty town, mainly filled with people involved with off-shore gas & oil exploration. There are a lot of miners accommodation camps here. Last night 2 American workers rocked up to our van just to say & hi & welcome!  The gentleman on my left is William K.Cooper,(from Mississippi ) site manager of the Wheatstone project for the LNG, & his Texan colleague, an engineer based in Perth.  Both lovely gentlemen & very friendly.  It was lovely to meet them.

Conveyor belt along jetty to load salt on to the ships.

These are tiny green budgies, there are lots of these flocks around here

Salt stockpiles, with conveyor belt that takes it to the wharf

Our dusty campsite!

War memorial next to our site.

At the war memorial, a beautiful sculpture of Diggers' hats, sitting on the bench.

Memorial for sailors lost at sea.

Now we know why we have started glowing in the dark!

The beach- we decided not to go for a swim.

Cossack & Wickham, Point Samson

Hi, a little day trip yesterday to Point Samson, Wickham  & the historic abandoned town of Cossack.  Outside the mining town of Wickham is this display of an iron ore transport truck

I am half the size of this tyre

Grae underneath the engine bay, see the huge tyre on the left.

Looking over Wickham

Iron ore carrier ships lining up on the horizon 

Honeymoon Cove

School house in Cossack, now a historical town, last resident left in 1950.

Custom house

Views of the courthouse

Inside the Couthouse

I walked down to the beach, sunk about 6 inches, more like quicksand than normal sand!

Cossack graveyard, graves of early founding families- the name William Shakespeare comes from the family estate in England "Shakespeare " Surname Hall

I showed a photo before of the schoolhouse- this little girl was at school there, & one day stepped on a rusty nail- she died of an infection from the wound, tetanus (lockjaw) 

Japanese end of the cemetery