Wednesday 16th June - Exmouth

I would pose the question of why does a prosperous, industrial, technologically advanced country such as Australia not have recycling facilities once you move north away from Perth, but I suspect that I know the answer - economics.  You can recycle aluminium cans, but there’s money in that.  You cannot recycle paper, cardboard, cartons, plastics, tin cans nor glass.  After travelling around for the last couple of weeks with an ever increasing pile of recycling, we’ve had to admit defeat and I threw it all in the rubbish (Anne couldn’t bring herself to do it and is still muttering about not having thrown away glass for 20 years until now).  It will be interesting to see when we find recycling again.  Maybe not until we hit the east coast?

Exmouth isn’t large but it has the basics, and we even managed to find some free Wi-Fi.  Fortified with a toasted Turkish bread sandwich and cake from the local bakery, we completed our list of tasks for the day, including collecting our replacement handbrake cable from the post office.

It’s the first time we’ve had something sent poste restante and it was strangely gratifying going in and saying that they should have a parcel for us and it being produced.  Anne asks all relatives to take note of our schedule (which we’ll blog shortly), just in case anybody wants to send us a home care package!

Anne’s acute sense of smell is useful for burning Land Rovers but has just caught me out as I ate a couple of bits of raspberry liquorice that were left in the packet.  Serves me right for not checking the wind direction; I should have made sure I was downwind when trying to conceal the act of consumption.
We keep bumping into a Dutch couple travelling with their two young daughters in a Mitsubishi Pajero they bought when they arrived in Australia.  We first met them in Monkey Mia, then in Cape Peron National Park, and now in Exmouth.  We find it hard enough travelling with just the two of us, so always admire those that travel with children.

Much against our ethos of paying for camping, we’re staying in Exmouth two more nights as we’ve booked to snorkel with whale sharks tomorrow.  The weather forecast wasn’t good for today so we decided to wait until tomorrow when it should be slightly improved, and who knows when we will get another chance to swim with the world’s largest fish.