Published: May 28th 2006OceaniaMay 28th 2006
Ok so where on earth did I leave off. I think it was Easter dinner at Monkey Mia. Alright well you’re going to have give me a second I killed off some brain cells this weekend and I don’t quite remember where we went from there. Oh of course the dolphins. Okay so Monkey Mia is a famous tourist attraction for believe it or not, not it’s exquisite dinners, it’s famous for giving people the opportunity to feed wild dolphins. All you have to do is get up at the crack of dawn. Or 7:30, to me pretty much the same thing. So we got up very early that morning and went down to the waters edge. Within about fifteen minutes four dolphins and a crowd of about a hundred people had gathered. The dolphin handlers then talked about the dolphins a bit and then picked six or seven people of the audience to feed the dolphins. Not overly exciting but I like dolphins so I was happy, although I recently read a scary headline “Dolphins get opposable thumbs, humanity says “OH SHIT”. And “Dolphins, not as bright out of the water”. That one’s for you c-unit. Ok well time to
move on to the next destination on our list. Corral Bay. This part of the story also takes us back to our seatbelt fiasco. You see Monkey Mia is kinda out at the tip of a peninsula so to get back to the main highway we had to drive all the way back the way we came so it took us most of the day to finally get to Coral Bay. By the time we were half an hour away there was very little light, but we figured we could make it so we turned down the music and the three of us just searched for any sign of movement. I swear to God I don’t think I blinked, it was like we were in some sort of video game and the second you spotted the kangaroo you had to yell out “LEFT” or “RIGHT” or “FUCK”. That last one was not one we wanted to use. Well like I said we’re alive so we obviously made it but I have never concentrated so hard on a vast landscape in my life. I know what you’re thinking if it’s such a vast landscape won’t you seem them coming, but let
me ask you this, if you’re driving a van with the engine underneath the front seat so there is literally no front end, do you want to take that chance? I don’t think so. Anyways we ended up in Corral Bay, so we had some dinner and went to get ready for bed when we found a note stuck in our door. It was from the friendly law enforcement and they were telling us we either had to pay at a camp site or get atleast 20 km out of the town. How lovely, so hoping to be safe rather than sorry, we searched for the local police building to ask just where would be the safest place to park. We stumbled across the cops drinking in a house, oh wait get this, the house was the police station. Oh man do small towns amuse me. Anyways we started to talk to the actual on duty cop when the rest of his buddies stumbled out of the house to try and help us out. They told us that we could park beside the house and then we could come inside and they could tell us all about Exmouth (our next
Girls at Corral Bay
Ash,Jen, Alice, Robyn, Me and Flip
stop). Hmm…drunk hillbilly cops or kangaroos, we decided that we would rather take our chances hitting a kangaroo and headed out of town. We came back the next day and ran into the other van of girls and headed to the beach. It was beautiful, the water was perfectly calm, turquoise and warm and the air was hot. One of the best beach days I’ve had here. Some of the girls went snorkeling and we even had a small shark panic. But it was just a wild dolphin that swam right into the bay where we were right up to the edge of the reef. How cool is that? Random Flipper sighting, completely unexpected. It was just one of those glorious days, day at the beach, good food, fun with friends and then jump into the van and have a late afternoon road trip into the redness of the outback. I sound like a commercial, here’s comes the tagline for Molson, I AM CANADIAN!!! I should get paid for this shit. Anyways we left and headed up to Exmouth, the final destination and the best part of the trip. The four vans and the one car met up and we
Whaleshark Gang
Alice,Nate, Ash, Jen, Me, Robyn, Brian and Dan in the front
headed to a place for the night. We got up at the crack of dawn, but seriously this time, and headed off to find the company through which we were doing the whale shark swimming with. I’m sorry, did I casually slip that in? Yeah that’s right we were going swimming with whale sharks. Who does that? I know we’re crazy. Alright so we got lost a few times and almost didn’t make it, there was some tension and some swearing, again cough *Nate* cough. But we made it and boarded the boat. We were really doing this and you could for a lack of a better term, “feel the excitement”. The first thing they did was hand out bodysuits and snorkeling equipment. Like the pro I am, I stepped into that thing zipped it up and started posing for everyone…then our guide walked by and told me it was on backwards. Don’t worry, Ash took a picture of my embarrassing moment. They then sat us down and explained to us how this whole thing worked. Now when the girls first told us about their idea to go swimming with the whale sharks I must say I had no idea
Drinking in the van
Flip,Lauren, Brian, Me, Nate and Colby in the front
what to expect. I pictured some big tank like in Sea world where you could just jump in and swim around. Needless to say I was far off, we were going right out into the ocean, these things were not tame. They told us that first they would be taking us to a part of the Ningaloo Reef where we were going to go snorkeling for a bit, then when they got word that a shark had been spotted, the boat would pick us up and we would race off to intercept it. Now the first thought that popped into my head was “How do they spot these things?” I’m thinking GPS system, all of the sharks have little tags that blink on a radar, I watch to many movies. The answer was a plane, there was a group of these boats that did the whale shark swimming and they all used the same plane which went up into the air and started looking. They then radioed it back to the boat and we jetted off to the coordinates they gave us. The second set of instructions they gave us was how we would work this whale shark watching thing. I mean there had to be some sort of order, otherwise everyone would just jump in the water and you can imagine how well that would go over when someone drowns because the shark knocked them out with his tail. So they divided us into two groups, and when they had word the first group would get all their gear on and wait at the back of the boat and then jump in the water and split into two groups that would move three metres to either side of the shark and then casually swim along. The second group would then get ready and the boat would move so that it could drop the second group in the path of the shark and they would do the same thing. Sounds civil right? Organized, easy…let me just say one thing, I now know what it feels like to be a marine. But I will explain more about that when we get to the actual shark swimming, there’s still tons to talk about. So first we went snorkeling along the reef, it was fun, nothing overly great. Brian spotted a reef shark and there was a giant turtle. Then they picked us up and we started off for the shark spot. Now I’m going to add a little random information at this part of the story because it explains some of what we saw next. About a week or so before we headed off on our adventure, Exmouth had a huge cyclone pass through, this kinda ruffled all of the wild life which meant that it was an anything can happen time. And that is exactly what did happen. Our guides spotted a giant mantaray that was swimming pretty close to the surface and decided we would swim with that. So this time we all just jumped in and it was pretty much how I said it would be if it were unorganized…chaotic. None of us had any idea what we were looking for or where we were looking and then all of a sudden then feet right below me I saw it. It was doing barrel rolls, which apparently means it was feeding and it just swam right below us like we weren’t even there. After it passed we were all talking about how exciting it was when we looked over and this giant school of trevallies (big fish) just completely surrounded us, they swam under us and between us, tons of them. It was amazing. I kept thinking to myself this is worth it, I would’ve done it just for this. But as a last note, I had no clue what was about to come.
