We set out today to get a small taste of the sights of the North West Cape. Yesterday we discovered that there were a myriad of boat tours of the Ningalo Reef all included swimming and snorkeling and offered the chance to swim with whale sharks or some other exotic sea creature. Since we are not really into snorkeling at the current temperatures we opted for the glass bottom boat tour so that we could see some of the coral and sea life without getting wet. Unfortunately as we approached the pickup point for that tour we got a phone call telling us the tour had been cancelled due to high winds. Thus our chance to see the reef at anything like close quarters was gone. We contented ourselves with viewing it from afar, the bright turquoise water and the surf breaking over the reef some hundreds of yards off shore.

Our second planned tour was also a boat tour of Yardie Creek, which delves back into a gorge that cuts into the Cape Range. The attraction of this tour, apart from the rock walls of the gorge were the local rock wallabies that live in the cliffs of the gorge. In addition we saw a number of osprey nests some of which were first documented in the late 1800s.

As you might gather from the photos North west Cape, Cape Range NP and Ningaloo is a great aquatic play ground that is largely devoid of development. There is an abundance of wildlife, even the town of Exmouth has Emu wandering the streets making themselves at home.