Exmouth, Western Australia: Whew! Exmouth is a very desolate place. We're told the locals say "ex-mouth" instead of the "ex-muth" we expected.
Think of Exmouth as the northwest corner of the Nullabor. There are no naturally occurring trees and the termite mounds are waist high. Wild emus wander around and we saw a large lizard, maybe the size of a dog.
Much of the reason Exmouth exists is courtesy of the U.S. Navy, which came here to install a low frequency long range radio station with which to communicate to submerged submarines in the Indian Ocean. The base and associated antenna farm are outside what passes for "town," one of the towers is 1000' tall.
We thought we heard the base was given to the RANavy, not certain about that. This would have been a barren, bleak place to be posted, lots of clean, uncrowded beach but not much else.
We did, however, see an RV park, with some minor occupancy - this isn't "the season." Southwestern Australians must come here in winter to warm up.
We did a glass-bottomed boat tour of a nice coral reef south of town, enjoyed it too. Turns out this reef isn't suffering from the problems plaguing the Great Barrier Reef. The so-called "crown of thorns" starfish is here but not a plague as at GBR, different conditions = different outcomes.
Now we head on south to Fremantle, the port of Perth where we'll overnight. I think we're there day after tomorrow.
