We had breakfast, packed & left the Shark Bay Caravan Park by 6.55am.  Monkey Mia here we come.  The start of the drive out of Denham was pretty, passing Shark Bay & Little Lagoon, the rest of the 23km was through low shrubbery & sand dunes.  The dolphin feeding started at 8 am (they only give them about 300g so that they will have to fend for themselves).  A mother & her young one entertained us – unreal how close they come.  They ask you not to touch them or to swim with them because they want them to keep coming back & stay wild (about 100,000 visitors come each year, it would be too much for the dolphins).  I was one of the lucky ones chosen from the many to feed one of the dolphins – it is unreal to see the dolphin so close & to put the fish in its mouth, it looks at you & smiles (I am sure it didn’t specially smile at me but it gave me that warm fuzzy feeling).  They had 3 mum dolphins with their young, only the mothers get fed, the young are still being nursed by the mother.   The adult males don’t get fed at all.  The crowd of around 100 people dispersed rapidly after the feeding & it was an empty beach again.

Our next stop was Eagle Bluff, around 40km back down the road, a 200m boardwalk has been built around the cliff top to give a great view of the shallow seagrass meadows below & the two small islands just offshore – on a good day you are supposed to see all sorts of marine life, including dugongs & manta rays, we saw none, however, we did see a majestic sea eagle glide past.  The scenic view was worth the stop alone, we could see all the way to Dirk Hartog Island & a salt mine with two massive piles of salt glistening in the distance.

Shell Bay was next, a massive collection of tiny cockle shells on a beach miles & miles long & hundreds of metres wide, the shells are reportedly 10m deep.  Its stunning walking across it, the tiny shells are piled up in waves corresponding to some of the massive storms that have washed them up.  The whiteness is very glary in the sunlight.  In the past the compacted shells were mined in blocks for building materials as a substitute for bricks.  Some of the old buildings in Denham are constructed of compacted shell blocks from this beach.  The shells are also used as shell grit, fed to chooks to assist them to produce hard egg shells from the calcium in the cockle shells. There is also a very lonely grave of a drowned sailor on the beach.

Hamelin Pool was next on the agenda, a collection of ancient Stramatolites, giant colonies of cyanobacteria that thrive in the very salty water (super saline) at the bottom end of Shark Bay.  The evaporation levels are so high in summer from the shallow water the salt is left in very high concentrations.  There are only two locations in the world that Stramatolites are known to occur & assisted in obtaining the World Heritage Listing for Shark Bay.  Stramatolite fossils have been dated back 3.5 billion years (that’s right, billion) & were one of the earliest life forms on the planet. Scientists believe that these were the main reason that oxygen levels were boosted to 20% of the atmosphere.  So, it seems we have a lot to thank the Stramatolites for.  We left a little piece of heaven on earth behind, promising to come back again for a longer stay.

Then the drive to Kalbarri, a further 340km through red sand dunes, (on good tarred road) low scrubby desert & an ever increasing number of wildflowers.  The closer we got to Kalbarri the better the displays became. We had to keep driving because we had to find a park before dark. We finally arrived in Kalbarri at around 5.15pm after 460km for the day, another big day. Ron & Sue had a hard days drive mainly pushing into strong head winds. We booked into the Anchorage Caravan Park & John put together a splendid Madras chicken curry with Tereza doing a great job on the vegies.  The red tonight was a Taylors Promised Land Cabernet Sauvignon – one of my favourites.  Another wonderful day.