“It’s booked, all booked, next to impossible to get a site, you had better book a caravan park in town.”
This was the line we were being fed while making calls and enquiries with regards to the availability of camping sites at Cape Range National Park. I deem it all to be codswallop, a marketing ploy used by the caravan parks of Exmouth in order to gain your booking for well over twice the price it costs to camp in the National Park.
Hello, my name is Lisa Mayne, and this post is an expose of Australia’s once best kept secret which I, among many a traveller, am about to blow, by spreading it across the internet.
Exmouth is on the North Western Cape, just above the Tropic of Capricorn. We have crossed this line of latitude three times in our travels. Exmouth is the gateway to Cape Range National Park, which runs down the west side of the cape, parallel to Ningaloo Marine Park.
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| our campsite at cape range |
Ningaloo Marine Park is home to the Ningaloo Reef – the closest fringing reef to mainland Australia. It rivals the Great Barrier Reef for diversity and beauty and is one of the few places in the world people can have an up close and personal encounter with the biggest fish in the sea – the whale shark.Cape Range National Park boasts over one hundred campsites, all of them beach front, most with terrific snorkelling just off shore and only $7 per person per night. The Novotel, the Hilton and any other high rise hotel or resort cannot boast any of those three things – and it’s no wonder its the pick of accommodation in the area!
It is pretty much permanently filled between Easter and September. And, with no bookings accepted, people are allowed in on a first come, first serve basis. Once you are in, you can stay for a maximum of 28 days. This is actually a good system as it keeps the grey nomads from stopping and perching there for three months like they do in Broome, or Karumba (although, plenty of them still take advantage of it…and why shouldn’t they?)
While in Carnarvon, which I might add, boasts the most expensive groceries we have come across so far, we made a few enquiries of various parks in Exmouth to determine the likelihood of snagging a site so close after Easter, and slap bang in the middle of school holidays. “It’s all booked and full” they said. So, we booked a site at the closest park to the NP entrance and were determined to get up at 5am to be at the entrance to snag the first available site (of anyone who happened to be leaving that day). We arrived at the gate at 6am, waited until 8am, had four or five cars line up behind us. Once the lovely parks lady opened the gate, we discovered that there were about…hmmm…maybe 15 sites coming available that day. So you have to ask yourself: is the normal stance of caravan parks in Exmouth to tell you that the National Park is booked, just so you have to pay extra to stay on their patch of sand?
To be fair, we are early in the season – we have heard stories of the June/July holidays going mental with line-ups starting the night before…
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| Lakeside snorkel site - brilliant |
Camping at Cape Range is the way to experience the Ningaloo Reef. Camping on the beach, with the reef virtually at your doorstep? Priceless. We stayed here for nearly two weeks to ensure we maximised our snorkelling and marvelling at the creation below the surface. Snorkelling we saw some incredible bommies of coral – huge cliffs of coral with their own coral garden on top full of tropical fish life. One highlight was definitely the angry fish – took several bights of Caleb’s hand and came pelting towards my mask when I swam to close. Ever played a game of chicken with a fish no larger than my hand? The fish didn’t stop swimming…
The most famous part of Ningaloo/Exmouth is undoubtedly the whale sharks. These sharks are harmless – they eat plankton. But they can grow to 10m in length and very little is known about their way of life. The tourism industry is capitalising on the opportunity to swim with the ‘biggest fish in the sea’ with about eight operators running tours out of Exmouth. They really are quite an awesome animal to swim with – but very difficult to keep up with!
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| Whaleshark |
While here, we also took advantage of the great diving, adding four dives to our log book. Two of these were off the Navy Pier, a site consistently named in the top ten dive sites in the world (Australia has two – this, and the Yongala wreck off Townsville/Magnetic Island). It’s the dive to do if you want to see squillions of fish of all shapes and sizes. People are not allowed on the pier, let alone fish off it, as it is controlled by the Navy. One company is given a contract to run dive tours off it and that’s it. It means there are huge fish any fisherman would be most happy to have in their brag book under that structure. The best part about it is that you don’t need to get on a boat – you can just jump off the pier! The other two were at a site called Lighthouse Bay, where we had an incredible experience – the visibility was all of 30cm…due to an incredible amount of bait fish! Swimming through these, all of a sudden coming across a huge predator – cod, travelly, tailor, all kinds!
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| Arno and Caleb with their Queenies |
And, it was also at Ningaloo that we had some real success fishing. Camped here for the best part of two weeks, you get to see what others are catching and where they are catching them. There are only two of us, so it doesn’t take a great deal of fish to satisfy us for a night. We befriended a backpacker couple from Amsterdam, Caleb took Arno fishing and came back with some great Queen Fish. We had the lunch of kings that day! Each of us managed to catch a shark each as well – I a shovel nose on the beach from our campsite and Caleb what he thinks was a baby bronze whaler.
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squiddy before he became
calamari! |
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| the best and freshest of calamari! |
But by far our favourite was the squid Caleb managed to catch – boy was he yummy! Although, cooking him did turn out to be one of Caleb’s many pyro-adventures – managing to heat the oil until it was ‘really hot’ and on fire in our van. Luckily, nothing else caught fire in the van, or outside where Caleb tried to poor it out onto the sand (and dry leaves…at least these were scraped away). I think we may have concerned the neighbours a bit, but on the second attempt at heating oil and frying up squid tentacles…our neighbours would have been jealous!
So there you have it – Ningaloo Reef and Cape Range National Park. Ironically, there isn’t a great deal in Cape Range; people come here fore the reef. The best spot for a holiday, even if it is on the edge of the middle of nowhere. It holds the record of the longest time we have spent in one place without working and we enjoyed every second of it!
