Remember the Missing Link? On Friday night Bruce came up with the brilliant plan to travel to Exmouth the next day. It's a driving story, an 'On The Road' without sex or drugs except the Emu Bitter in the Esky. The Pajero seats are contoured to our asses by now, and I can't be bothered to unload the fishing, camping and snorkelling gear anymore. Setting off is as simple as pointing the car North... after 140 k's there's Minilya roadhouse with fuel, and the turnoff to Exmouth. Bush, a dry riverbed or two. Roos, the odd emu. Another 140 k's later the track to Ningaloo and Yardie Creek.

I just can't get over the scale of the place. The track is sandy or rocky, sometimes twisty. No tire-tracks or other signs of recent human activity...just distant dunes and hills. Cloudless blue skies except for a faint haze where the sea-air hits the coast. Sometimes a glimpse of the lagoon behind Ningaloo Reef. I concentrate on the driving, Bruce is on the lookout for wildlife, plants, geological features. We stop for anything worth seeing.

First, a big lizard, a good metre in length, black with orange spots. Bruce jumps out and stalks the animal cautiously. Apparently they're liable to attack if you're between them and their den. I get on the roof of the car- purely for photographical reasons of course. It sauntered to the car, its forked tongue tasting the air, and all of a sudden it ran away at about 40 k's an hour.

By now Bruce is in a hunting mood and stalks a distant kangaroo. 'Like the Aboriginals did when they still used spears'.....Pretending to be an overweight emu in bright blue shorts he hides behind a bush before slowly moving towards the roo. Which would have none of that, and it bobs off into the distance. As we drive away, we discover a second kangaroo sitting under the very bush Bruce used for cover. He almost stepped on it.

Finally we arrived at Yardie Creek. The mystique of the place! The bitumen stops at the Exmouth-side of it, and most people turn back. There's no bridge. And the 70 k's of track we'd just covered are pretty rough. From the stories I expected torrents of raging tides, big 4WD's hitched together, and the rusty skeletons of the casualties half-buried in the shifting sands. In actual fact there was only an inch of water and we did it in 2WD to prove a point. Still, very beautiful. The creek runs in a gorge in the Cape Range, and I hope to canoe up-creek one fine day.

Once beyond the creek, the road runs between the Cape Range with its ridge of fossilized coral and the lagoon. The beaches are stunning, and empty. Apparently, on a morning about six years ago the first person out of Exmouth found dead fish scattered over the plain up to 300 metres inland. That was all the evidence for a big tidal wave. The area is really deserted! Turquise Bay is exactly what it says.

Anyway, Exmouth is a hole. The youngest town in Australia (and that's saying something...) built for the US army base. There's a submarine-communications centre on the tip of the peninsula which is strangely enough on dry land. A grid of massive radio towers spoils the landscape. But Bruce knew some folks there and over a beer the stories began. True folklore from the frontier towns north of Perth. About a new-year's party in years gone by, for which the helicopters of the oil-companies and the Royal Flying Doctor's joined forces to ferry nurses, doctors, riggers, stationhands and jackaroos from all over the Kimberleys and Pilbara to a distant beach. About the scuttled dinghy in which three naval officers sailed from Singapore to Exmouth Gulf during WWII, with nothing but a bottle of beer per man per day to keep them going. About aboriginal graves and hidden waterholes. Vast secret caves in the limestone of Cape Range, where rituals used to be held. Our hosts were very knowledgeable about aboriginal culture- I'll try to write a page about that sometime. There are few people in this vast area, and thirty years ago there were almost none. Any character or daring deed gets woven into the stories.

Sunday found us exploring Shothole canyon- see above- which was refreshingly vertical after so much horizontality. And Charles Knife Road runs up a ridge between two canyons. Touristy (there was someone else there!!) but lovely. And rather than taking the bitumen back to Carnarvon, we detoured to do Yardie Creek boogie once again. And the Ningaloo-Coral Bay track to get it out of our system. Stirred and shaken we took turns to nap on he long, windy (that's a force 7 headwind, not anything less than straight) road home. Good stuff. And there's still another 1500 k's north to explore, not to mention an equal distance east. Never mind the rest of Australia.

Kees