Our next destination on the road to Perth is Shark Bay. This wolrd heritage site is unique due to its very salty water and the inhabitants of those special comditions. It is also known for its stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, which were – to put it shortly and simply – responsible for the beginning of life on earth.
A few kilometres east of Denham there is a place called Monkey Mia. It is not really a town or something, its more like a privately run National Park with a Caravan Park and a Resort. Their specialty is the “experience” as they call it, with the Dolphins each morning at 7.30 or at noon or actually every 10-15 Minutes. So we drove there to stay for the night and to be by the water on time for the experience. About 50 people and 20 pelicans gathered by the beach, while a lady introduced us to the feeding that morning and explained a lot about the life of their Dolphins. It was quite interesting. Luckily nobody was allowed to touch the Dolphins…you never know with those tourists.. 🙂 And after the first session we met Gregg again which was funny because we just saw him the day before at the stromatolite site, the shell beach and now Monkey Mia ?.
It was raining almost all night and also in the morning there were still some showers here and there… we headed out of the Park to go to a real National Park, the Francois Peron National Park. A place you can only go to by a high clearance 4×4 vehicle because of the road conditions. First you register at the entrance, pay the fee for the campground, then you drive approx. 5-10 minutes until you reach a station where you need to lower your tyre pressure to about half of the usual, because the streets or paths are all sandy!!!
It was great fun to drive on the sand ??, in some parts it seems that the car is running on rails, following the channels dug by the preceding cars. Anyways, we headed up to the northern most point of the Park, as this is where we were planning on spending the night. Not only have we seen those beautiful colours of the sand and sea like everywhere on the west coast, but also did we learn that when there are cormorans near the beach, no sharks around?.
We passed the worst part of the road without any damage to the car (we lost one egg, which broke during the rough drive : smaller scrambled eggs portion next morning ;-)) and installed ourselves at our campsite. As it is the case so often in this part of the world: nobody around. So we decided to go to the beach with our fishing gear and try our luck… and we eventually caught one big enough edible fish… Unfortunately the BBQ at the campsite didn’t work so we had to use the pan, which resulted in quite a mess, but the remainder of the fish which did not stick to the pan was really tasty!
The next morning back on the sand and a short stop at the big lagoon, still no one to be seen.
Last step we went back to the station to fill up the tires again and left shark bay… What cannot be put in words can be seen in the following pictures…like the Emu family we crossed on the street, or the contrast of red white and blue by the sea…
