Dreams...: Monkey Mia and its marine life

Another Oasis opening up in front of us after another long day of desert driving was Monkey Mia. The small resort place a few kilometers from Denham in Shark Bay looks like a piece of paradise on earth. White sand, clear water, coral reefs, palm trees and dolphins coming up on the beach to get fed. Christine observed that sometimes they look like torpedoes in the water... :)

The first day we set out to explore Francois Peron Nation Park by a 4WD Jeep tour. A German couple, Nina and Dennis were with us on the tour and as we waited to get picked up, an older Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up and an oldish man got out. At first Pat thought the man had only brought the car and that our driver/guide would arrive soon. But it soon was clear that he was our guide. He looked somewhat like Fidel Castro and his name was Tim Hargreaves. It turned out he was a well known local character, a councillor, a preacher, a guide, a builder (he built a restaurant out of compressed shells for his wife in Denham), a driver, and a writer...

So we took off and hes asked all of us what we were doing. He was especially happy to tell every Australian we met that Pat was a criminologist and that they should be aware of Pat because they were, in his opinion, all descendents of the convicts brought over from Britain...:) So we had a good laugh. As we left the old sheep station at the entrance of the park, we were driving along peacefully through the sand when all of a sudden a shower of water and green cooling liquid spurted from the engine onto the front window...a hose had broken off the radiator and we couldn't drive any further...hmmmm, that reminded us of course of an older episode from our trip...dear old Manfred breaking down near Goulburn. So we waited for the engine to cool down, had a bit of tea and an apple and tried to make it a bit further in the car. After a few meters, the smell of a hot engine became very strong and we stopped. After Christine helped figure out how the satelite telephone worked, Tim called in for help. That would take at least 3 hours. Along came a very kind and friendly Austrian couple in their 4x4 and they offered to take us to the cape where we could at least look down on all the marine life in the bay and Tim waited with the car.

When we got to the cape and its viewing platforms, we were not disappointed. We could observe sharks, manta rays, shovel nosed rays, giant sea turtles, dolphins, all kind of fish...it was amazing just standing there and watching them glide through the shallow waters. The 3 1/2 hours we had to wait in the end for someone to come and get us passed very quickly and, at the end of the day, we had a great experience and a cool story to tell :). Christine bought one of Tim's books about life in Shark Bay and finds it very entertaining :)

The following morning we were (again) on a wildlife cruise on (again) another catamaran. We managed to see some Dugongs, these sea creatures of a mixture between a dolphin tail and a sealion front. It is believed Dugongs led to the legends about mermaids (Meerjungfrauen), as tehir tails look a lot like them in traditional drawings of mermaids. There were a few dolphins jumping along the boat for a while.