A 645am alarm to allow us a hot brew before the 20 minute
drive over to Monkey Mia (pronounced My-er rather than me-er, FYI). Everyone around us had disappeared before we
even moved, maybe we’d left it a little late?!
We paid our $12 each for entry into the park (it is NOT
included with our national parks pass, disgraceful!) and walked through to the
beach to find the crowd getting a lecture on ‘the rules’ of the day. So we hadn’t missed a thing in fact! We were allowed down into ‘the dolphin zone’
of the beach and it got quite crowded along the water line, so we decided to
break away from the flock and head up to the jetty for a more birds-eye view of
proceedings. There were four dolphins
swimming in the shallows of the bay in pairs.
They knew exactly what was going on.
They clearly like an early breakfast! To clarify, these are wild
dolphins that choose to come into the beach up to four times in a morning to
receive carefully weighed out amounts of a fish that they normally hunt in the
ocean. Well, they’re not silly are
they? It’s like choosing to go to a
greasy spoon café that is giving out free full English breakfast because you
can’t be bothered with the cooking at home – a ‘no-brainer’!
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| Four dolphins for breakfast please... |
It wasn’t just the dolphins that made the view
spectacular. There were the pelicans
(above) and numerous sea turtles.
There were very strict rules about the timing of the feeding and
providing signals to the dolphins when it was time for the fish to appear in
the shiny silver buckets. The staff got
everyone to take their feet out of the water and back up the beach and the
dolphins came in closer to the beach immediately. They have us trained to
perfection! The volunteers walk into the shallows and carefully select a ‘feeder’
to paddle out to them and feed a single fish to a specific dolphin. It is stressed that you must not try to touch
the dolphin, one girl reached out and received a severe reprimand in
return! As soon as they’d had their
three free fishies, the buckets disappeared up the beach and the dolphins
vamoosed in the opposite direction in a ‘so long, and thanks for all the fish’
stylee! There was clearly no point for them in hanging about.
Barely 830am, we returned to the van to get ready for a beach
day. Appearing back at the beach only 20
minutes later, it appeared that the second feeding of the day was about to
start – the dolphins were back for more!
This worked for us, because this time there were fewer pesky humans
about on the beach, leading us to get a waterfront spot. This was the closest I have come to wild
dolphins, but still neither of us got selected to feed a dolphin despite our
best pleading glances.
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| The dolphins roll onto their side so they can get a good look at you |
Feeding time over again, we moved to the area of the beach
that you can swim in. We tried snorkelling,
but it was too sandy, so you couldn’t see much.
A couple of dolphins came back nearby to try their luck again, but the
fish shop was closed for the day so that’s the last we saw of them. Instead, we had a lazy day catching rays (the
sun ones) in paradise, with the odd cold beer thrown in for good measure. In fact, we made sure we stuck around until
4pm when most had left so that we didn’t miss happy hour.
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| The view of the resort from the sea... what a place! |
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| This seagull in the carpark made me laugh.... it doesn't believe in playing by the rules! |
It was relaxing to know, for once, that we had a campsite
booked so we pulled into our bay late, made a quick dinner and slapped on the
after sun before using some more good Wi-Fi.
Excitingly, the best thing we managed tonight was to successfully book
our relocation deal from Darwin to Adelaide.
On the ‘imoova.com’ website we selected Darwin and noticed a deal for only
$5 per day to drive a motorhome down to the south of the country, starting on
December 1st, the day after we drop Ozzie off. And they’re offering $80 towards fuel. Of course, there are some regulations about
maximum mileage and some extra charges to get the ridiculous excess fees down,
and we have only 8 days to do the journey.
But that’s what we wanted for this leg of the journey. No messing.
North to south in just over a week whilst stopping briefly to check out
the red centre and without having to resort to taking a greyhound coach. I expect this will be quite an experience in
understanding the immense scale off this country. We will have to put in some long days driving
to make it.
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