Shark Bay/ Monkey Mia

After leaving Cape Range, we stopped off in Exmouth to restock our food supplies and as it was my birthday, we had a lovely brunch at an organic cafe that was DELICIOUS. Good smoothies and great eggs benedict with smoked salmon on the side- my favourite brunch. The kids had a great play in the public water park too. The next couple of days were full of lots of driving. We knew we had limited time for this area as we want to spend more time in the Margaret River/ South West corner of WA so we drove and drove with a night in Carnarvon to break it up.

We were unsure about whether to make the trip to Shark Bay/ Monkey Mia. We had read mixed reviews about whether it was worth the 300km side trip. We have never been disappointed about making a detour in this trip so we went for it. Lots of people don't like the commercialisation of the dolphin interactions and say you can get the same thing down the road not in a resort, but we really enjoyed it and the girls learnt a lot about the dolphins and their environment and for us it was totally worth the 300km extra kilometres. We hadn't booked Monkey Mia resort and we called on the day to find it was booked out but Denham is only 27kms away so we stayed there and got up early to drive to Monkey Mia for the 7.45am briefing. They can feed the dolphins up to 3 times between 8am and 12pm. They only feed the female adults and they only feed them a tiny portion of their daily food requirements so they don't loose the ability to hunt for themselves. They don't feed the males as it can cause them to become aggressive and they don't feed the young so they learn to catch fish in the wild. For the last 12 years you are not allowed to touch the dolphins and as they are totally wild animals it can vary each day how many come in to feed. We had lots of dolphins in the bay diving and playing but 5 of the females come right in for a feed. Enjoy the pics!

 

 

 

baby dolphin (10 months old) trying to get milk from Mum but Mum not interested

 

Baby had enough!

 

A visitor on the beach

 

Pelicans, emus and dolphins!

 

 
 

 

On they way to and from Monkey Mia we stopped off at the Stromatolites (rock like structures grown from single cell bacteria). These ones are 'only' around 3000 years old but until about 500 million years ago, stromatolites were the only evidence of life on the planet.

 

We also stopped off at Shell Beach which is, you guessed it, made entirely of shells. It was a fun little detour to Shark Bay and Monkey Mia. Now it's time to make a move to Perth.