Part 6 (Monkey Mia)

Monkey Mia, which is a little spot on the beach located about halfway up the Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay, is about as close to a world-famous attraction as one finds in North Western Australia. What makes Monkey Mia famous is that, since the 1960's, dolphins have been coming very close into shore every morning to get fed. If you get there about 745, which we did, you can catch the first and usually best feed of the day. Access is pretty tightly controlled - they're very worried about health problems to the dolphins so no one can actually touch or swim with them (as was once the case) and only a few people are selected to do the actual feeding. But you do still get to stand a little way into the shallows, get a ery up-close look at the dolphins, and get some cool information from the guides, which made the program well worth it.


Here's two of the dolphins, a mother and a calf. There's actually only five dolphins that get fed, all females, and they often have their calves with them as they swim in close to shore. One of the reasons they don't let everyone feed is that the calves need to nurse about every 15-30 minutes, and they have to back off into deeper water to be able to pull the logisitics of that off.


None of us were chosen to feed, but this lucky lady was. I think it was height discrimination.

Random point of fact - I was quite confused as to why the place was called Monkey Mia, as clearly there were no monkeys anywhere near. The visitor center said that in the old days pearl divers were quite common in the area (pearl farming is still quite big in the region). Many of the pearl divers had monkeys as pets, or alternately were Chinese and so were called "monkeys" by white settlers, but anyways that answered my question for the most part ("mia" is aboriginal for "place of")

After seeing the dolphins feeding, we walked a little ways down the beach to a boat hire place and each rented out a sea kayak for the day. The service was excellent, $30 for the whole day and that included a waterproof bag each and some expert tips on where to go. We ended up pretty much just hugging the coastline and heading up north for a few hours. Much like at Shell Beach, there was a coastal shelf that extended really far out, probably at least a half mile in some places, and made the water shallow enough to stand in (and not just for me!). The farther away we got from Monkey Mia, the more sea life we saw, and there was quite a diversity - sea turtles, sharks, cormorants, and, quite a ways out, probably 30-40 stingrays all swimming around the shallows looking for food. It was pretty cool.


This was at least a half mile out, and we tied our kayaks up to this post and took a swim in the shallow water (no stingrays here!). Longkuan was new to kayaking, but after a little struggle early to get the paddling down, he beasted through the rest of the day, even staying out later than Noam and I to get some extra paddle time in. I think we may have found him a new sport.


The beach we stopped at for lunch was totally deserted and covered in a whole variety of shells, very cool.

We got back from Monkey Mia around 4 and bought some steaks to barbecue at the caravan park. In a true moment of Aussie hospitality, our campsite neighbors also invited us over - completely out of the blue - to have a couple drinks and to share some homemade sausage, cheese, and olives, and we hung out with them for a few hours. Good times.