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Published: August 18th 2006
The trip to Denham required a couple of transfers - first back to the main bus at Binnu, and then to a minibus at Overlander for the 1.5 hour drive to Denham. Elena, Daniel, and I were going to be staying at the same hostel - a YHA - and my first impressions weren't favourable. The dorms are arranged in sets - each set consists of 3 dorms together with a shared kitchen, common area, and bathroom. I'm in a miniscule 4-bed dorm with 2 girls and it's a tip, with their belongings strewn all over the place. The bathroom is ankle-deep in discarded bikinis, underwear, and what appears to be the entire Loreal hair products range.
After dumping our stuff, the 3 of us decided that a cold beer would be an appropriate way to welcome ourselves to Denham, so we followed a trail of backpackers from the hostel to a pub. There were several familiar faces in the pub, including Kat and Beth (an English girl who will also appear again), both of whom are travelling on the Easyrider bus - more of that in another blog. We soon moved on to another (the other?) pub in town,
which was significantly livelier and with a higher drunken person density.
When leaving the pub, our attention was grabbed by a stocky guy who had his hand round a woman's throat and was shaking her around, with another girl standing to one side screaming. With this not being acceptable behaviour in any country, Daniel manfully waded in to put a stop to this, at which point the guy pushed the woman to the floor, and gave Daniel a few punches for his pains, fortunately inflicting no lasting harm other than to knock his glasses off. The guy, who was clearly drunk, threatened us with further violence, then stomped off to his pick-up and drove off at high speed. The woman seemed OK, though obviously a little hysterical, so we left her in the care of her friend. We returned to the hostel with a fairly low opinion of Denham.
The first night was relatively sleep-free, mainly because noise from other residents continued well into the early morning. There seemed to be a large number of English accents among them, which I can't say I'm too pleased with (though I imagine most of the English people here didn't come
half round the world to meet me either). Also, the girl in the bunk below mine had returned at about 3AM, clearly didn't realise that I was in my bunk, and had started dumping things on top of me. When I coughed exaggeratedly to draw her attention to this, she stared at me for a few seconds, said not a word, then removed her belongings from my bunk and went out of the room. In those few seconds I recognised her as an English girl with a really annoying voice who I'd seen/heard in Kalbarri.
I did a dawn recce of the town, noting that it consists of pretty much just 1 street, with a narrow beach and the sea on the other side from the hostel. There's an outdoor seating area in the hostel containing a large projector TV, which was surrounded by enough empties as to explain away last night's noise.
Denham is the largest settlement in the Shark Bay area. Shark Bay is one of the very few places in the world that have been accorded UNESCO World Heritage status based on satisfying not just 1 but all 4 natural criteria for listing. Amongst other
reasons put forward to justify the listing are i) it contains the world's largest seagrass meadow, ii) at Hamelin's Pool, the hypersaline environment has enabled the survival of stromatolites (creatures that existed 3,000 million years ago and slowly bubbled oxygen into the atmosphere to the point where our own primordial ancestors could develop), and iii) it supports a substantial number of threatened animal species. Throw in a dugong population of 10,000, a beach composed of several metres thickness of small shells (Shell Beach), and a forest of 6-inch high trees averaging 500 years in age and you have a region that has a staggering number of natural phenomena.
Despite all these other USPs, unfortunately Shark Bay has become synonymous with Monkey Mia and the dolphin feeding sessions that have been carried out there for years. Though research at Monkey Mia has contributed significantly to the understanding of dolphin behaviour, the vast majority of visitors come to this area simply to see the dolphins being fed - which is something they could do in umpteen places around the world. I could tell that this was an enormously frustrating state of affairs for those people in the area who were trying
to promote the other attractions of Shark Bay (and, quite frankly, the dolphin feeding sessions were the least interesting thing I saw in my time here, apart from the England-Ecuador game).
Elena, Daniel, and I were hoping that we would be able to cheaply link all the various sites we wanted to see by hiring a car together. Unfortunately this proved to be impossible - with the cost of the car hire, fuel, and excess km (a meagre 100km was generously allotted per day) added up, it wasn't going to be good value even for 3 of us. And with the fact that we wouldn't be allowed in the Francois Peron National Park (4WD only), we wouldn't even get to see all that the area had to offer. After much mulling, we decided to do our own thing individually.
For me, that meant that I booked myself onto a tour that would see everything except the National Park, plus 2 more tours that would cover the National Park and its environs. To get on the first tour, I would need to get to Monkey Mia, which jived nicely with the fact that the hostel put on a free
minibus to Monkey Mia each morning, so I would be able to see the dolphin feeding before going on the tour.
Don't ask where the name Monkey Mia comes from. There are numerous explanations for its provenance, including that a monkey used to live there but it's now MIA. The rest sound equally spurious.
As hinted at 3 paragraphs ago, the dolphin feeding was a bit of a circus, with more than 100 people knee-deep in the water snapping pictures of dolphins for all they were worth. Though there are hundreds of dolphins in the bay, only 6 or 7 regularly come to the sessions, with another 20 or so making random appearances. The calves and males are never fed (because they need to learn to fend for themselves, and they can sometimes get aggressive, respectively), and the females are given a maximum of 1/4 of their required daily intake. No dolphin is fed until it has been in the feeding area for 30 minutes, so turning up for a quick snack is not an option. Taking photos was a constant battle against the other people who kept wandering into shot, as well as the water reflection.
There was a second feeding session about half an hour after the first, at which fewer people were present, and then another one about an hour and a half after that, with even fewer spectators. The main dolphins that turned up were Puck, Piccolo, Eden, and Nancy, some of whom were related (but just who were the mothers and who were the daughters escapes me now). They are recognised by their dorsal fins, which acquire cuts and dents courtesy of either shark attacks or over-amorous males.
After the first feeding, I ambled over to the appointed meeting place for the tour, where there was already a Kiwi guy waiting. I felt sorry for him because he was peeling like crazy (when he scratched his head, it was as though a skin blizzard had descended upon us). We chatted for a while, until the pick-up was already 30 minutes late. A quick visit to the Information Centre then informed us that the tour had been cancelled due to lack of numbers. I was not happy about this, as not only was it going to mess up my schedule, but the company must have known yesterday that they had insufficient people
and hence could have phoned the hostel to let me know. Failing that, they could have turned up at the meeting place and told us then. Following the cancellation I'd had in Kalbarri, this seemed like another piece of irritating bad luck.
With the shuttle bus not due to head back to Denham until mid-afternoon, and there being no public transport linking the two places, I whiled away the hours firstly by mapping out a rough itinerary for the coming month (realising that I'm not going to have time to get any further than Darwin), and then joining Elena on the beach. Back at the hostel we discovered that Daniel had impressively managed to hitch lifts to both Hamelin's Pool and Shell Beach, so at least someone got something out of the day.
That evening was England's World Cup game against Ecuador, for which the hostel ferried in a hot tub (the owners of the hostel are both English, as are most of the guests). The game was dire and did not bode well for their extended presence in the tournament.
The following day was devoted to the Big Bay Day tour, run by Shark Bay Safaris,
Jellyfish
Non-fatalwhich is essentially Mr Leon Deschamps. I had realised over the last couple of days that Leon was something of a local legend, and had received many glowing recommendations for his tours. It turned out to be a small group, consisting of just Beth, Daniel, and me.
Leon is a real character, though in his case this wasn't a euphemism for "loud and annoying". I thought he resembled Edge circa The Joshua Tree, though with a more Irish complexion (strange Denham genes) and a lip piercing. Plus I suspect Edge can't speak 4 Aboriginal languages and assorted dialects, nor could he be considered an expert on Aboriginal culture. Leon had done an incredible number of jobs in his life, including being a fisherman, goldminer, barista, waiter, kitchen help in a restaurant in Edinburgh that often served the royal family, boutique winery manager, nightclub manager, etc. His knowledge of the Shark Bay area, and his clear enthusiasm for his work, was comprehensive and totally infectious. In fact, he barely drew breath the entire day and we were overwhelmed with information about a million different topics, some completely unconnected yet delivered in interweaved monologues.
The day was spent in Francois
Peron National Park. This is part of Project Eden (not to be confused with the Eden Project), an initiative which is aiming to re-establish native species by eliminating feral predators (in particular cats) via a poison called 1080 (to which local wildlife is immune), and then keeping others from coming in via an enormous electric fence (complete with a tape recording of barking dogs) running the width of the isthmus. Our first stop was at Skipjack Point at the northern end of the park, where Leon provided us with polarising sunglasses and we peered into the clear waters of the bay below. It felt very similar to my first safari in South Africa - a whole lot of nothing revealed itself to my city-dweller's gaze. However as Leon started pointing things out, it was obvious that the sea was teeming with activity. A bronze whaler (shark), a lemon shark, a fiddler ray, eagle rays, a school of whiting - all this and more was cluttering up the ocean beneath us. Moving on to another nearby lookout, we saw more sharks, an eagle ray female, and her harem of smaller eagle ray males.
Breakfast was at Leon's favourite beach (name
withheld), where we climbed a small hill and were rewarded with sightings of dolphins, a rare sea eagle, and a dugong - though the latter barely broke the surface a few hundred yards out and I wouldn't have demurred if I'd been told it was a scuba diver.
As we were driving through the park, we encountered a number of creatures on the rough track. The first of these was a convoy of small, furry, grey caterpillars - in my journal I wrote down that they were spitfires, however subsequent Googling seems to indicate they were maybe processionary caterpillars. When one of these chaps goes for a walk, he will leave a trail of silk which other caterpillars of the same species will latch on to, resulting in a nose-to-tail convoy as seen in the photos. Leon demonstrated that if one of the caterpillars is moved out of the convoy, the whole lot stop until the displaced member resumes his position.
We then saw an echidna crossing the road. This was the first one Leon had seen in the park so he was really excited by it. The echidna was unlike the other echidnas I'd seen, in that
it didn't seem too concerned at our presence and pottered around for several minutes before disappearing off into the bush.
Shortly after that we came across a blue-tongued goanna (probably - I am no biologist, and clearly not a great note-taker either). Leon used to catch these and sell them when he was a kid. Though they are fairly harmless, they can make a suspiciously snake-like hissing sound while sticking their tongue out in an alarming fashion.
Leon also gave us some information about the various plants that we saw around us. Aborigines have been using the flora of the region for eating and medicinal purposes for thousands of years and, armed with this knowledge, you would be unlikely to starve, die of thirst, or be unable to treat many common ailments. For a headache, inhale the aroma of some crushed headache vine leaves. For a cough, do the same thing but with tea tree leaves. Crush some billygoat weed and apply it to a cut for faster healing. And so on.
The final stop of the day in the park was in a "forest" of miniature trees. It's suspected that some of the trees are about
500 years old, though they are only 6 inches high. In the photos without any horizon, it's difficult to tell whether they're 6 inches or 6 feet tall.
With the day already reaching late afternoon, it was time to return to Denham where Leon put his culinary skills to work on one of the public barbecues by knocking up a meal containing kangaroo and mullet, washed down with some beer. He mentioned that he'd been bitten twice by redback spiders when he was mining - the site doctor had essentially told him to get steaming drunk, and the resulting hangover would take his mind off the pain of the bites.
So the Big Bay Day tour is one that I would highly recommend to anyone staying in the Shark Bay area. I did not have as fun or informative a tour on my entire Australia trip as this one. To leave here thinking that Monkey Mia is the main attraction of Shark Bay would be to do the whole place a major disservice.
Daniel headed off to Coral Bay on the Greyhound, leaving Elena and I to watch the Italy vs Australia game. Of course, she was
the only Italy supporter in the entire crowd, and the manner in which the game ended (dodgy penalty, though idiotic defending by Australia, in the last minute) would perhaps have made her a target for a lynching if she had celebrated in a more ostentatious fashion.
My remaining day in Denham was as lazy as they come, with only a couple of hours in the Shark Bay Interpretive Centre to break up reading, sleeping, and eating sessions. The Centre was excellent, containing information about the ecology, botany, flora and fauna, etc of each of the distinct areas of Shark Bay, all presented using the latest technology. It was a shame there was such a desultory trickle of visitors.
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