Cape Range National Park (7 nights)

This National Park is a great base to enjoy the Ningaloo Marine Park and its various sanctuary zones where the marine life is protected from fishing etc.  There are camping areas along the length of the park, we camped at the South Kurragong camping area where there are 12 sites; all were generally full at this time of year.  Kurragong is one of the beaches where you can fish and when our retired teacher buddies Graham and Jacky arrived, Leon and Jacky proceeded to go fishing together several afternoons, no fish for tea though!.  Being the only kids at the camp for most of the time a lovely lady called Ingrid (recently made a grandparent) took to spoiling the boys with hot chocolate, popcorn and chocolate cake!

Jacky and Leon fishing

The South Kurragong Camping area, view from the sand dunes

Our camp site, John securing the guy ropes to the fence!

We met some more great people at that camp site and at 5.30pm each day people gathered for sunset drinks at the picnic tables looking out to sea.  Most nights humpback whales were cruising past beyond the reef spouting and leaping etc, dolphins, reef sharks and turtles were spotted within the reef area, amazing spot! One morning I walked along the beach and saw an octopus fishing - mesmerising!.   In the morning just around sunrise there were kangaroos hanging out on the beach, during the day they stayed in the dune areas watching the humans no doubt, and in the evenings they hung out by the sealed roads as they were warm.  A pair of zebra finches took a liking to our roof rack and started marking a nest one afternoon.  They are tiny little birds and looked quite cute carrying big twigs up to the rack, only to be very disappointed when we drove off in the morning to explore another spot.

Sunset drinkies

One of the amazing sunsets

There were plenty of spots to snorkel along the coast.  At Kurragong there were forests of spiky blue coral and a great range of fish, Enzo was lucky enough to have a turtle swim past him!  At Turquoise Bay you can drift with the current, there we saw a ‘painted mask ray’, a huge creature with big eyes.  Oyster Stacks is shallow so you need to go at high tide, the coral there was very pretty and you can get very close to the fish.  South Mandu beach was also good for snorkelling and John and I recognised this as the beach that we visited on that inaugural trip and had given us a taste of the Ningaloo as part of a day tour we took from Exmouth.  So there we were, exactly where we had vowed to come back to!

The only downside to the stay was the wind that started at either 11pm or 4am and lasted through to about 3pm.  The 11pm start-up was not conducive to sleep for people in tents (caravan envy!) so we were pretty jaded most of the time, the positive side being the calm sunset for socialising. 

These funky green crabs were scuttling around the rocks at Kurragong.

The funky green crab