The wonderful Shark Bay

We have just been at Shark Bay, a world heritage area for its natural beauty, earths evolutionary history, ecological processes and biological diversity.  It is one of the few sites in the world to meet all those criteria.  When you drive into the area there is a cattlestop with a predator fence stretching either side to control the number of cats, goats, rabbits etc entering the area.  As a vehicle passes over the cattlestop a dog barking sound is triggered, another control measure.

We camped at three very different places while there, firstly the quirky Hamelin Pool caravan park, (music playing in the bathrooms!) then the stunning Francois Peron National Park in a bush camp and finally the Monkey Mia resort, all are posted below.

Monkey Mia (2 nights)

Despite the name this place is all about the dolphins!  ‘Monkey’ came about most likely because of the monkeys that the early oriental pearlers kept as pets.  “Mia’ is the Aboriginal word for hut or home.  

Every morning at 7.45am five adult female dolphins are hand feed off the beach, people line the shore and some get chosen to feed a dolphin, the boys were pretty happy when they got selected! More than the five usually turn up and they are all very sociable, they cruise past the strange humans in a line with an eye on them, checking them out. 

We basically just hung out there for a few days, swimming, lying in the sun, walking the nature trail, a talk about turtles the first night and on the last night we took a sundown cruise on the catamaran Shotover, nice!

Sundown cruise in Shark Bay

Francois Peron National Park (2 nights)

Accessing the camping spots in this national park is via a single lane, deep sand road.  Although we have been on plenty of unsealed roads, so called 4WD only roads, this road is REAL 4WD stuff.  We learnt a lot about when to use high ratio and low ratio, how to dig out of the sand (not fun in the heat!), about the need to reduce tyre pressure on the vehicle and the trailer to gain traction (all were down to 16 psi) and about retaining momentum.  We also learnt the hard way about the need to secure any heavy items in the back of the vehicle as they may move when the momentum being maintained is too hasty and then deep, cannon like corrugations suddenly appear, and the item may, for example smash a back window of the vehicle.  Needless to say the drive out again was much easier with this new found knowledge.

Luckily the grey hair causing drive in was worth it!  We camped at Bottle Bay near the top of Cape Peron and had a site a stones throw from the beach.  It was good for a quick dip but the presence of sea grass, and as another camper told us there are sharks lurking about, made snorkelling a no-go.  Fishing however was good to go, Leon proceeded to catch us four Whiting for dinner.  They are small fish so it was helpful to have the campers next to us offer up some Snapper! 

The proud fisherman

A key feature of the park is Skipjack Point overlooking the north west corner of Shark Bay Marine Park.  There are two viewing platforms and info boards explaining what you might see.  That day the water was dead flat and we saw the lot!  A dugong, three bottlenose dolphins, a small tiger shark, a turtle and two eagle rays.

On e of the viewing platform at Skipjack Point

View from the platform

On the drive out we spotted a very long snake, several goannas and a blotched blue tongue skink, perfect as reptiles are latest thing for the boys.

Hamelin Pool (2 nights)

Hamelin Pool is at the south end of Shark Bay and there are a heap of living marine stromatolites that are a sample of the earliest record of life on earth.  There is a viewing platform reaching out in the water so you can see them close up without walking on them.  They exist here so well due to the hypersaline conditions in that part of the bay, caused by an underwater bank restricting tidal flow. The caravan park where we stayed actually had a few stromatolites set up in a tank so you could see them side-on and see the oxygen bubbles they create raising to the top.  All very interesting.

The Stromatolite boardwalk

some of the stromatolites and a few fish

Also at the caravan park there is the old Hamelin Pool Telegraph Station, morse code travelled up and down this line until it was no longer needed in 1950s.  But then in 1964 when the first Gemini space capsule was to be tracked across Australia the station was used at a critical moment because the phone line got zapped in a lightning storm.  Good old Mrs Lillian O’Donahue spent 4 hours relaying important info backwards and forwards through the station, I was pleased to find out she was given a special award by NASA!

From Hamelin Pool we did a day trip out to Zuytdorp Point where there are the False Entrance Blow Holes.  It was pretty full-on driving through the sand dunes to get there and the boys, being boys, threw rocks down the blow holes, they got a fight when one came back up when the hole blew!!

False Entrance Blowholes

dramatic cliffs at Zuytdorp Point