Day 64: Last day at Coral Bay

Today is a bit of a rest day getting ourselves ready for the next few destinations. They will be very different from this totally tourist driven town. It is a great destination that survives on its location alongside the Ningaloo Reef, and has a real buzz about it even outside school holidays. It reminds me a bit of Airlie Beach, but it is much smaller.

However thye caravan parks are very large. The map below shows how big our caravan park is, and the related businesses associated with it. When we arrived it was very full, no vacancies and there were vans in an overflow park they also have which is behind the arcade. Today there seems to be a lot more vacancies, but there are always new arrivals but it is unlikely to fill. Our site is probably not the best in the park, close to the Reef Cafe and an active nightlife there.

 


The Coral Bay Arcade has a bakery, Foodland supermarket/hardware store, newsagent and some tour booking offices. Whilst there is no hospital here, they do have a permanent nurses station to cope with basic medical needs, and then there is the flying doctor.



No bargains here


The bakery is easily the busiest store as it has good coffee and is just across the road from our park. There is another cafe down the road at The Peoples Park caravan park but service is terrible. The cafe at our park for some reason opens early, then closes and reopens at 1 pm.


One of the tour booking offices

After breakfast we went for our morning walk, this time up over the dunes at the southern end of the bay, not far from the big RAC apartment development.

There was a lookout on the top of the dunes, that has almost been consumed by the dune. The lookout platform has about 200mm of sand over it at the Northern end.


Viewing platform


Looking down over Bill's Bay with RAC development in right foreground


The glass bottom boat is returning from its morning tour

It has been a pretty lazy afternoon, as the breeze did return. However, we enjoyed having a bit of a rest. We went to Bill's Bar for dinner and had a pretty good meal. Tomorrow we are heading to Quobba Station, back to bush camping on what looks like an amazing part of the coast.


Bill's Bar





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