Shark Bay and Monkey Mia

Our first big excursion in Western Australia was to Shark Bay about 8 hour drive north of Perth. Shark Bay is difficult to describe. It is stunningly beautiful but also stunningly stark. More than once we felt like we were alone on the edge of the earth. Shark Bay is protected by offshore islands and a peninsula, resulting in great expanses of warm, calm, shallow water (captured so well in Daley's photo).


Shark Bay is a "world heritage site" because of its natural beauty and environmental uniqueness -- it hosts the largest remaining population of dugongs, the world's richest beds of seagrass, and stromatolites.



But the main reason we went to Shark Bay was for the dolphins at Monkey Mia. Every morning for the last 40 years, dolphins having been showing up for brekky on the shores of Monkey Mia. Tourists like us come from around the world to watch the dolphins up close and to feed them. Both Daley and Sode got to hand-feed fish to the dolphins.


In addition to the dolphins, we saw several dugongs (salt-water cousins of the manatee) including a mama dugong and her nursing pup. We also saw eagle rays soaring out of the water, turtles, sharks (small, thankfully), sea snake (the most poisonous animal on earth), and emus.


Emus definitely take the cake as one of the funniest looking creatures -- but they have a certain charm. We saw a large emu with 6 youngsters when we entered Monkey Mia. We mistakenly called the adult a her -- not knowing that once the female emu has laid her eggs she is gone. The male emu incubates the eggs and then cares for the young for up to 2 years.



We also stopped at Hamelin Pools to see the world famous stromatolites (more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites). These are some of the only remaining stromatolites in the world. Scientists are fascinated by these formations for what they can tell us about the origin of life on earth. Stromatolites are formed by cyanobacteria, a bacteria that dominated the earth for more than 2 billion years and is responsible for putting enough oxygen in the air to enable new life forms to develop. Must admit that they looked a lot like rocks to me, but. . .



Monkey Mia also was where we celebrated Clint's 4th birthday. He was delighted to have pancakes with Nutella for breakfast, followed by cake and ice cream poolside in the afternoon. We played with his new cricket set on the beach after a pizza dinner.