A week on the Coral Coast Part 1

After 7 weeks working to keep Western Australia’s plumbers in check, we decided we’d had quite enough of earning and saving, and thought we’d spend our last week on this side of the country exploring the west coast as far north as Exmouth (about 13 hours’ drive north of Perth.) Our planned route began with a couple of nights in Monkey Mia, before crossing the Tropic of Capricorn on the way up to Coral Bay, where we’d spend a few nights. Finally, we’d head down to Kalbarri for one night on our way back to Perth, hopefully just in time to catch our midnight flight to Auckland.

So, after work finished on Friday afternoon (where we were given a grand send-off party by a grateful Plumbers Licensing Board,) we went back to the hostel and packed ready to set off first thing the next morning. I had one last score to settle though. The week before we had made a lasagne and left half of it, labelled, in our bag, in the fridge to have for lunch at work the next day. When we came down in the morning, half of that had disappeared. A couple of days later, the same thing happened with a bread and butter pudding I’d made. I decided that if someone really had to have our leftovers, I might leave a little surprise in there for them. So, a Friday night trip to the chemists was made and, a couple of hours later, a delicious laxative-laden bread and butter pudding was lovingly left in the fridge, labelled exactly the same as the one before and left in the same spot. You can only begin to imagine my disappointment when we came down the next morning to find that the hostel mouse had decided to just take a spoonful on this occasion.

Ang playing in red dirt

Our journey to Monkey Mia began with a short trip over to another hostel in Perth to drop off Matt (A friend of Angela’s from home) and Emilia, who were leaving Perth after a week’s holiday to head back to the Gold Coast. After the best part of an hour’s driving, we were surprised to still see signs pointing off the highway towards Perth City. A quick check of our Greater Perth street directory revealed that we’d managed to get lost before even leaving the city, and had in fact begun to drive in a massive loop around it. Fortunately, from this point on we managed to keep to the right route, and 9 ½ hours after setting out, pulled in to the Monkey Mia resort with a moth-splattered windscreen.

Angela was pretty excited about the main attraction at Monkey Mia; wild dolphins that came to the beach every morning for a bit of showing off and half a bucket of fish. Apparently it all began one evening 40 years ago with a fisherman’s wife throwing the scraps of her husband’s catch to a pod of dolphins she saw nearby. The dolphins re-appeared the next day and they’ve been coming back almost every day ever since.

A dolphin attempting to look anything other than a vicious killing machine

Angela pored over the rules and regulations regarding dolphin etiquette in the little leaflet we’d been given when we’d arrived. You were supposed to stay in a straight line with the other visitors just out of the water. If the dolphins swam up to you, or you were asked to go up and give it a fish, you were under no circumstances allowed to touch it (Angela mentioned the next day that she had a strange dream that night, where a baby dolphin swam up to her during the feeding, and forced her to pat it on it‘s head with its flipper. What a weirdo.) The leaflet stressed that these were wild animals and that they could bite. My brother-in-law’s views on dolphins rang in my ears; “vicious little buggers……The badgers of the sea.” I paid particular attention to the dolphin stress signals that the leaflet identified: tail slapping on the water, coming out of the water with teeth bared and making loud clicking sounds were all included.

Our hero tames the wild killer

As we woke the next morning to sheet rain coming down, we decided it was probably best to wait till the next morning to try to catch the dolphins; nobody knows if / when they will appear, and they’d already had two feeding sessions that morning. So, we decided to hit the beach at the earliest possible feeding time the next morning, and as soon as we headed out we could see a crowd had already formed and the dolphins were there waiting for us. There were 4 dolphins in the shallows, slowly swimming around. The park ranger had us all arranged along the edge of the water, as apparently that made the dolphins more likely to swim along the line. They were introduced to the crowd as they waited for their food, and after about 20 minutes of swimming around, waving flippers and looking cute, they were given their food. Random people were picked from the crowd to give the fish to the dolphins, but neither Angela or I made the cut. We decided to pop to the resort’s shop on our way back to our room, and while Angela was still in there choosing postcards, I noticed that the dolphins had reappeared out on the beach. We made our way back down again, were able to get a really good view, and I was even given the honour of feeding one of the dolphins when the time came.

More shells on Shell Beach

Afterwards, we began the journey up to Coral Bay. Just outside Monkey Mia, we stopped off at the aptly named Shell Beach. It’s a massive beach made up entirely of tiny shells (which apparently is 5 metres deep.) An hour further up the road we made another detour to see the Stromatolites . I didn’t really understand what these were, but from what I do understand, they’re something like the first forms of life on Earth. They’re not much to look at though; just little mounds that would look to the layman (me) like weird little stumps of rock. And the information board next to them made the disconcertingly vague claim that stromatolites might have allowed all other life on earth to evolve. For me, if you’re going to claim responsibility for starting all life on Earth, you’ve got to sound certain about it. Perhaps allowing my mind to wander over such important issues, my focus drifted off my speedometer….

A week on the Coral Coast Part 1

Monkey Mia, Australia