Dolphin Time At Monkey Mia

Since arriving in Western Australia, one place that all the tourist brochures have talked up, is Monkey Mia, some 11 hours from Perth. A pretty solid detour off the main highway, you have to be pretty keen to see the place, as it's adds a good 3 hours onto your trip up north. We thought the Nullarbor was remote, but I swear up this end of W.A, there's more roadhouses then actual towns and most places are a good 300 or 400km apart.

So after taking the turn to Denham (Monkey Mia isn't actually a town, but a resort and caravan park, where the famous wild dolphins swim right up to the beach, so most people stay at the town of Denham, 23km away), our first stop on the drive along the World Heritage listed Shark Bay peninsula was the amazing Shell Beach. No prizes for guessing why this place is called Shell Beach (well, duh!) but seeing all the tiny little shells covering some 13km of coastline was beautiful. Walking in bare feet on them was even better! Apparently they mine these shells for all sorts of reasons including to feed to chickens to harden the shells of their eggs (weird, I know!) and to crush and make cement blocks to build houses out of (I wonder if you can hear the ocean from inside these places?). But I think they're best left where they are, as there's nothing quite like seeing the waves lapping a shell covered shore.

Looking out from Eagle Bluff over Shark Bay was our next turn off and was pretty spectacular. There are 23 different breeds of shark living in these protected waters and apparently you can usually see a few cruisin' in the shallows from this lookout. We saw a couple of rays, but that was about it, which was probably a good thing because it might have been a hard task getting me in the water otherwise.


Denham is a friendly little ocean town but there's not a whole lot there so you really do need to be pretty self-sufficient and bring your own water and food with you. We got up early the next morning to try and beat the rest of the touro's out to Monkey Mia for the first dolphin feeding (how wrong were we!) and ending up lining up along the shores with the swarms of other campers waiting for the dolphins to arrive. Everyone thinks it's really crazy how these wild animals swim right into the beach and interact with humans, but truth be told, the dolphins were encouraged and fed by local fisher people waaay back in the 1960's and after enjoying a bit of a free feed, they have simply kept coming back. Hardly a natural phenomenon.

Now the Monkey Mia dolphins are big business but luckily National Parks have taken strict control of the tourist attraction and don't allow people to touch or swim with the dolphins and only feed each animal a few tiny fish each day, so they are encouraged to still fend for themselves in the wild. There's something about dolphins that send most people a little batty (I coped a few elbows as fellow campers fought to get as close to the dolphins as they could) but I must agree, they are pretty magical creatures. They look you in the eye like they're trying to tell you something and seem to radiate relaxation and calm. Seeing them play around our feet was definitely worth the extra kilometres.






To top off a great day, we took some advice from a local lady we met wearing bike pants and a tie dye singlet and sporting a face that looked like she'd seen so much sun that you could easily whip together a nice little leather handbag from each of her cheeks, to hit the local jetty that night for a guaranteed catch of squid. True to her word, there she was at 6pm with her rod in hand, pulling in squid left, right and centre. And minutes later, we were too! Salt and pepper calamari for dinner...mmm. All our new friend could say was "Told ya they'd be on, Love! We're the winners! We're the winners!" while delicately balancing a ciggie in her lips. Classic.

Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette