First on our list was an early morning visit to Monkey Mia to see the dolphins.Monkey Mia is renowned for being a place where you can experience close encounters with their visiting Indo-pacific bottlenose dolphins. Every morning between 7.45am – 12.00pm, there is dolphin feeding on the beach. This is run by Department of Parks & Wildlife officers and you need to be very lucky to be picked out to feed a dolphin, and strictly no touching.
We arrived early and decided to stand on the jetty to view the feeding, we’ve fed and swum with dolphins before, so thought the less crowded jetty would give a better view and photo opportunity (it did! And we also saw turtles aswell!).
As the dolphins are wild, there is always the chance they won’t come in for a feed. Luckily for us quite a few dolphins came in while we were there. Up to 5 mature female dolphins are offered food the first 3 times they visit each day. If they come back again they won’t be offered food.
The dolphins are only fed a small amount of food each feeding. As they are wild animals, they want to ensure that they keep hunting for their own food and teach their young this behaviour aswell. By limiting the food offered to the dolphins they can still live as the wild animals they are and won’t become reliant on humans for food.
After our early start to see the dolphins, we continued on with the day and headed into the national park for a look around. François Peron National Park covers an area of 52,000 hectares.
The park was named after François Peron in recognition of his contribution to recording Australia’s natural and social history. François documented anthropology, oceanography, meteorology and zoology during Nicholas Baudin’s 1801 and 1803 expeditions.
First we visited the Peron Heritage Precinct which included the old Homestead and also gave an insight into what life was like during the pastoral era, and how they shearers lived and worked back in the day when this was a large working sheep station.

Such an Aussie problem!
This area also had an artesian bore open to the public. Would have loved to go in this if it hadn’t of been so cold, the wind was fearce that morning!







Our last stop for the day was a visit to Ocean Park Aquarium. This place isn’t your typical aquarium, but we loved it.


We saw Nemo!


We even learned a few things …. eels have two sets of jaws, their ‘pharyngeal jaws’ are housed in the eel’s throat. When the eel’s main jaws close on its prey, its second set jumps forward into it’s mouth, grabs the prey and drags it back into the throat!
We also found out that all crustaceans shed their skin, had no idea about that either! Go and google lobster shedding its skin, it’s pretty cool!
View from the aquarium
The weird things you come across sometimes!
Had to stop for traffic on the way back to town!While in Shark Bay, of course we also had to go visit the Shark Bay Hotel, Australia’s most Westerly hotel!
We also happened to be staying at the Denham Seaside Tourist Village, which is apparently the most Westerly Caravan Park in Australia!
We are George & Shelly, a married couple from Sydney, Australia, who love 4WDing, camping and travelling this great country of ours. We love sharing our adventures and hope to inspire others to travel as well. Join us on our journeys around Australia!
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….. making memories one track at a time
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