Coral Bay

LMK and I do not believe that Coral Bay is a real town. Instead, it is two caravan parks, two guesthouses, lots of bars, and a shopping centre built in a cyclone bunker. I've been to rural towns with a population of 20 that have more civic spirit than this place. If the tourists stopped coming everyone would forget it was even here. 

The weather, which has been great for most of the trip, finally turned on us. It was very windy, and rained for much of the first afternoon and evening and then intermittently for much of the second day. Consequently the pristine coral wonders of the bay remain somewhat unknown to us, as snorkelling in high wind is not great for spotting much at all. Louise managed a snorkel at Five Fingers Reef, and said it was 'nice',  and I did some some very wind-affected canooing in the main bay, but most of our time was spent beach-walking, jogging, birding, and hanging about at the backpackers, reading. A food highlight of the trip was the delicious chowder at one of the beach restaurants. The crocodile popcorn was not so good. 

All in all, Coral Bay was...OK. Maybe if we'd had better weather, or taken a boat tour, we might have gotten more out of the place, but I felt there was much more to do in the Cape Range National Park near Exmouth. We have just gotten to Shark Bay (Denham) this evening, and I can see already there is plenty more to do around here than there is in Coral Bay. Apart from anything, the name of it sounds like a town from an ABC TV Show, and there was a general sense of fakeness about the place that wasn't there in Carnarvon or Exmouth. I was not sad to leave it.