{"id":9,"date":"2010-06-01T08:41:29","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T02:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/?p=9"},"modified":"2010-06-21T09:40:31","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T03:40:31","slug":"how-to-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/?p=9","title":{"rendered":"How to begin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Except it wasn\u2019t the worst of times. But then it was time to pack up and leave. And so we did with six bottles of red wine we had left in our cupboard. We\u2019re definitely flashbackers at the moment but that won\u2019t last very long.<\/div>\n
So we picked up our Cheap Campa (which turned out to be an Apollo one, we\u2019re not complaining) and hit the road. The first few days we made pretty good progress because there isn\u2019t that much to stop for really. Except for The Pinnacles at Cervantes – a desert of thousands of limestone pillars, some of them as high as 5m. A pretty impressive sight. The next few days we spent driving up further North, stopping here and there, taking walks on numerous beaches. You always think “now that\u2019s the nicest beach I\u2019ve seen in Australia so far” and then you turn around the corner and go “maybe not”.<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>At Hamelin Pool I learnt what stromatolites <\/a>are and I admit I had no clue what they were. But James was really keen to see them so I played along until he asked me why I was packing in a jumper to go see them. I thought we needed to go into a cave – stromatolites, stalactites, I thought they were all of the same family. Well so much about pretending to be clever \ud83d\ude42 They look like rocks but they are actually one of the oldest living organisms. Quite hard to grasp and fascinating.<\/div>\n
We detoured to spend a few days at Denham\/Monkey Mia in the Shark Bay area. Monkey Mia is famous for the bottlenose dolphins that turn up every morning. Ok we should also mention that\u2019s because they get fed by some rangers. It\u2019s a bit of a tourist spectacle but then there isn\u2019t many places you can see dolphins so close up. The irony is though that we did actually watched some dolphins playing and chasing fish straight in front of us when we were talking a stroll on a beach a few days later at the Ningaloo Marine Park. But then again you can never get enough of dolphins.<\/div>\n
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Our next stop was Ningaloo Marine Park area. We spend a night in Coral Bay – the name says it all – and headed to Exmouth, a place in the middle of nowhere with emus wandering around the campsite and cockatoos screeching above your head. Ningaloo Marine Park is famous for the incredible variety of marine life you can experience. There were quite a few \u2018once in lifetime moments\u2019 during the four days we spent there. Just think turtles, reef sharkes, manta rays and whale sharks! Yeah keeping the biggest for the end.<\/div>\n

The manta rays were an unexpected surprise at the end of a dive\/snorkel trip. We were ready to head back into the bay when one of the diving instructor shouted “manta rays” and literally went over board. Never in my life have I seen 10 people jumping of a boat that quick and swimming for their lives to catch up with them. But it was worth all that to see them swirling in the water only a few meters from us and finally gliding off into the distance.<\/p>\n

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It was good to take a day\u2019s break from the water after that race and so we headed to Cape Range National Park to do some walking and to spot rock wallabies, kangaroos, emus and tons of birds.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s hard to describe how it feels when you first see a whale shark coming at you with the mouth open feeding on a soup of plankton. They\u2019re harmless creatures but the sheer size of them is quite scary at first. We saw a 6m and a smaller juvenile one and once you get over the first freeze moment, you don\u2019t want to get out of that water anymore. It took a few days for it to sink in and I still see them swimming by in front of my eyes when I lie in bed at night.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re now in Broome after 3 days of serious driving and a fun stay at Sandfire Roadhouse, looking at the stars, drinking red wine with our neighbours and listening to all sorts of weird animal noises from the animals they kept at that place. It\u2019s gotten a lot hotter and thankfully Broome\u2019s Cable Beach with a water temperature of 28 degrees is only 7 min around the corner. Not trying to make you jealous.<\/p>\n

Click here for the photos<\/a><\/div>\n
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Except it wasn\u2019t the worst of times. But then it was time to pack up and leave. And so we did with six bottles of red wine we had left in our cupboard. We\u2019re definitely flashbackers at the moment but that won\u2019t last … Continue reading How to begin?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}