Everyone’s heard of Monkey Mia, and most have probably been there. I’ve been before – travelled the 25km on the deeply corrugated road to stand waist deep in the water and pat the many dolphins that swim up to the shore line each day for a feed of free fish. Not anymore! Now there’s a Nomad friendly bitumen road, an Interpretive Centre full of Parks staff who manage the Dolphin Interactions, and this season’s record number of visitors on the beach seeing the dolphins was 750! I’m glad our visit wasn’t quite that busy. There were about 100 people at Interaction 1.

About six dolphins came to shore today. They are all females and were nursing their calves at this time of year. They all have names, and they know the drill when it comes to a free feed.

Mums and calves hang together

The staff make sure each individual dolphin only gets a certain amount of fish, so that they still know how to survive in the wild. They really look after the dolphins’ wellbeing.

Despite the reputation of Monkey Mia, I have to say that I’ve had so many much better experiences with these very intelligent animals. Like watching them surf the waves at Tallows Beach, just near the Byron Bay Lighthouse. Or seeing them compete with the surfers for a wave just last week at Red Bluff. I like the natural habitat for them.
As for Fergus and Harry, they said they both preferred seeing the pelicans that day! There are a few that hang around the beach there, so we did our share of picture taking with the pelicans.

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.

Ferg has reminded me that I missed adding this gallery to the posts from back at Red Bluff. He was a very dedicated son watching from the rocks for hours. Not a comfortable place to sit! He caught one of John’s tube rides.

Today is my birthday, and I’m 50. It makes it seem a bit too real when you type it! I woke up and cried when the boys all said Happy Birthday. I really, really don’t want to be 50.

After our extended stay at Red Bluff, followed by our sand pit camp right here, it’s now been six days since we had a shower. My hair feels like it has too much hair spray in it and John needs a shave rather badly.

Fergus cooked up pancakes for us all, and John did the coffee. This wonderful little Italian invention is the very best thing we’ve brought on the trip.

I wouldn’t go anywhere unless the coffee maker comes. I hunt high and low for good, fresh coffee beans too. A little obsessive? For sure.

The boys have given me this deluxe camping chair for my birthday.

It is a quantum leap from the old one – three more of which the boys are still using. So I’m like the Camp Princess now.

John has given me a gorgeous hand carved seat/bench made from tree branches made by a man in Darwin. We saw some of these seats in Central Australia and I just love them.

Given the glassy conditions this morning, it was, perhaps, a little naïve of me to think we would leave straightaway. Nah. We went up to Turtles surf break for another “quick one”. I must say the smile on John’s face was exceptionally big when he returned from the water.

I’m a bit sick and tired of taking surfing photos actually. And we haven’t even got to Kalbarri yet.
So finally, we are on the road to Carnarvon. We did some chores, and stopped at the long jetty – 1493m long!

It’s quite historic and is being restored by some local volunteer groups. The pylons are made from jarrah from the forests in the south west. They’re building an Interpretive Centre (that’s the new lingo for Visitor Centre) at the jetty. Carnarvon also boasts an enormous (really, really enormous) satellite dish that helped track the NASA Gemini and Apollo space missions. The Grey Nomads wouldn’t miss anything on tv with a dish that big.
We left town rather later than planned, and pulled off the highway for a bush camp. The sandy track we took looked quite firm, but was actually very soft. This was a bad thing. We got bogged in the sand about five times. We used the clever “get you out of the bog” rescue tracks that had yet to be christened. That’s another item we’ve brought along that’s been used – although I could well have done without the opportunity.

After about an hour (and finally letting the tyres down), we were free and sat round the fire for a well-earned beer/G&T. Can you believe I’m drinking UDL cans? That’s another story.