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Published: April 7th 2007
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We left Jurien Bay and spent a day traveling up to Kalbarri, taking in a few coastal viewpoints on the way. The traffic on the roads was getting quite heavy with the start of Ozzie school holidays and I’m sure we annoyed lots of people who were in a hurry to get somewhere, by trying to maintain an economical 70-80kph…. By the way, when these guys go camping, they do it in style; massive 4x4’s, big trailers, vast caravans, some with air brakes and side bits that expand magically to create extra room.
Of course most of them have a boat of some sort, because other than watching the ‘footie’, the proof that you are a real man in these parts is your interest in fishing, not ability mind you - just your interest…, or should I say obsession, with fishing shops the size of supermarkets and adverts for gear and fishing trips everywhere, it really is a national pastime. Put it this way, along the lines of a redneck saying “I like BOTH kinds of music, country AND western”, I could imagine some of the folk around here saying ‘I like ALL kinds of sport - huntin’, shootin’
AND fishin’”.
The most common watercraft of the average Ozzie is the ubiquitous, ‘cheap as chips’, ‘fair dinkum’, ‘good-as-gold’..... tinny, a totally lethal aluminum dinghy, with zero buoyancy, guaranteed to sink within 15 seconds if any water comes over the sides. But heh, as long as the waves aren’t higher than 3 inches and you don’t run out of the drinkable ‘tinnies’, then ‘no worries mate, she’ll be right!’
After failing to find a suitable free camp spot near to Kalbarri, we were squeezed into the caravan park in town which was full to the brim with holidaying Ozzies who had booked 6 months in advance. The next morning we checked out the pelican feeding on the beach, a slightly vicious affair even before it was interrupted by an unleashed Yorkshire terrier, who was more into feeding on the pelicans, than vice versa. Then it was another long haul up toward Monkey Mia, a tiny spot on the peninsula that sticks out in Shark Bay and famous for its ‘wild’ dolphins. On the way we stopped in Hamelin Pool (actually the sea and part of Shark Bay) to look at the oldest life forms on earth -
a colony of Stromatolites billions of years old. Sort of living rocks, growing in the shallow sea and producing oxygen, which began to support air-breathing life forms a very long time ago.
After an overnight at nearby Denham, it was onto the dolphins at Monkey Mia, where we arrived for the first feed of the day at 7.30AM. The story goes that decades back a local fisherlady used to feed them as they followed her back to shore in her boat. At first a handful of people used to come and camp rough on this insignificant patch of sand, but what was once 40 people every year became 400 and now thousands of people make the pilgrimage to see the famous dolphins at Monkey Mia. The golden rule of marine conservation is don’t feed the animals, as this interaction obviously changes their behavior and can lead to dependency and unnatural behaviour. The justification for the regular feeding here comes down to how strictly it is controlled and that although ultimately it is wrong to feed them, it is better to provide a restricted amount in 3 organised sessions a day, rather than let the general public feed whatever they
want whenever they want which would be the alternative. Because they only get a little of their daily requirements they are forced to maintain their natural foraging habits and fend for themselves. At the end of the day it was all rather contrived and we slightly regret succumbing to the tourist trap affect and found subsequent glimpses of truly wild dolphins swimming offshore far more rewarding.
Having had our fill of dolphins and cooeing tourist, we made a dash back inland and some way up the Northwest Coastal Highway, before retreating off the road into the middle of nowhere, for an evening of antisocial bliss.
The next day it was back to the crowds and another top tourist spot, Coral Bay. Great snorkelling though as we are at the southern end of where the huge Ningaloo Reef, lesser known although of equal class to the Barrier Reef comes within a few hundred meters of the shore.
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