Sub-tropical

Thursday 18th September - We've made it out of the tropics, not without drama. We left Exmouth on Tuesday, had a look at Coral Bay, very nice, very small, pretty crowded, and spent the night in Carnarvon - which had decent wifi, hence lots of pictures in the last post. We had a quick look around Carnarvon in the morning, which was a first for us - clouds in the sky sufficient to obscure the sun, though it soon burnt off. Then we set off for Monkey Mia to spend some time with dolphins.

All went well as we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn but further south in the middle of the outback (OK, within mobile phone range of a roadhouse) we had a tyre burst at 100kph. Fortunately it was a rear one so I was able to stop without much drama. However, changing a tyre on the edge of National Highway 1 with road trains whooshing past was a challenge. It is possible to concentrate on what you have to do even though all the local flies are crawling over your sweating face, but it isn't nice. I managed to change the shredded tyre and we made it to the campsite with no more incident, except a few emus in the road.

Today we made the acquaintance of Footy in Denham the nearby small town. He took the wheel and tyre off us and started searching for a replacement. Eventually he was able to locate one in Perth, and it is now on its way up here, hopefully to arrive tomorrow morning. However, Footy says that is in the hands of "those drug-riddled truckies", so lets hope our one is on uppers not downers.

But before that we went down to the dolphin interaction experience. Louise says there is something a bit unsettling when a wild dolphin looks you directly in the eye while you are standing in the water a couple of feet away. I had gallantly held back to let her into the front rank along with the German youths and elderly Japanese ladies. It's my turn tomorrow morning. We had another wildlife experience on returning from sorting out the tyre, when I had to shoo away an emu which was raiding next-door's tent for some bananas.

I've just tried to upload some more pictures, but it appears that we are back to ice age internet which is struggling to save even this small amount of text ... so watch this space.