We started our trip out to the Peron Peninsula where you find the famous dolphins at Monkey Mia, the town of Denham, and Francois Peron National Park leading to Cape Peron. It sits in Shark Bay, a World Heritage listed area reaching from Kalbarri to Carnarvon. The marine life thrives on the rich sea grass beds of the bay. The road out there is rather long and devoid of much vegetation, but this helps make it so spectacular with red cliffs and white sand beaches. We stopped at Hamelin Pool, where there is the world’s best known colony of the ancient life form of stromatolites. Now these are pretty much rocks in the water, but at 3.5 billion years old, they take credit for producing the oxygen that makes life as we know it today possible. (Not these particular rocks, just their forebears) They’ve built a great viewing platform to walk over the area, so I’ll show you that because the actual stromatolites are pretty boring.

Next stop along the peninsula is Shell Beach. Another random naming effort – it’s a beach made of ……shells! It’s 120km long and up to 8m deep – all shells.

They mine some areas of the beach and use the shells for feeding to chickens, topping for pathways and formerly for bricks to build houses.
It’s pretty spectacular, and you definitely need your sunglasses and a thick towel if you’re baking here.

On the beach, we ran into our fellow Torquay travellers that we first met in the Northern Territory. We also saw them in Kununurra, Broome, Tom Price and Coral Bay. It’s a small world for a big country.
We arrived in Denham and found a pretty little seaside town, home to many fishermen. It started as a pearling town, and the streets were once paved with pearl shell. Note – they aren’t anymore. Denham is also Australia’s westernmost town, giving local businesses the added marketing tag – “westernmost (insert whatever you want here)”.
Whilst exploring the area round town, we saw this echidna crossing the road. He was fairly camera shy.

Things have been pretty lean on the animal front so far this trip, with just one snake and the usual ‘roos and wallabies, so the echidna really brightened the day.
It was finally time for that shower – it was a beautiful thing. We went out for dinner at a seafood restaurant made entirely of shells to celebrate my first 50 years. It’s going a bit yellow now (the restaurant I mean), but it was a memorable place to have a great night.