Friday 7 September – Well the washing didn’t blow away, though the clothes horse did blow over, but everything was dry overnight, so that is good.  I went over to do my washing at about twenty past seven this morning, but the four machines were all chugging away nicely, so that had to be deferred till later in the day.  There were obviously several people far more organised than I was!

After breakfast we set off on today’s sightseeing around Denham with the wind blowing a gale, and made our way about thirty kilometres south to Eagle Bluff, as it’s name implies, a high spot with a good view over the crystal clear water, and apparently a great spot to catch a look at several sea residents such as turtles, sharks, stingrays and especially dugongs., which tend to frequent this area feeding on the sea grass that is prevalent here.  On the way down the dirt road into the Bluff we did stop when we saw a really good shingleback lizard (or bobtail as they call it here), and I managed to get a photo of it before it wandered away.

Once at the Bluff we made for the lookout, then walked the boardwalk along the coast for a hundred metres or so, with the only thing we saw being a lazy stingray lying about in the clear water not far from shore.  But I’ll tell you now – if there hadn’t been a handrail along the edge of the boardwalk, I reckon we would have been the big attraction in the water – the wind was so strong!

From there we went to the Ocean Park Natural Marine Exhibition or Oceanarium, which is a bit of a fancy term for an aquarium.  We took the guided tour all around the tanks and learned about (and saw) many examples of sharks (the lemon shark, the wobbygong and the nervous shark), turtles, snapper, cod, lobster, stone fish, blue bone, lion fish and lots more.  The walk around and commentary took about an hour and was very interesting, especially when they fed the sharks.

A lion fish

After we left there, we were driving back out to the main road on the dirt road when Grant suddenly pulled up and started reversing.  He, with his eagle eyes, had seen something a little different on the road, so he backed up until we were pulled up beside a thorny devil.  How exciting!!  They only grow to about twenty centimetres in length, so he did well to spot it.  So I got out to photograph it, and it didn’t even budge, so I managed to get a really good shot of it.  Unfortunately the battery in the camcorder hadn’t been charged last night (my fault) so I couldn’t get it on video.  But as it didn’t move a muscle, we didn’t miss much.  

Thorny devil.

We then returned to camp where I did the washing, we got a couple of bits at the supermarket and had lunch before going off on our afternoon excursion – first stop Monkey Mia.  Here we saw another four examples of wildlife – 4 emus wandering across the road.  We had to stop for them.  After paying for our entrance to the park we discovered that the dolphins come in at about 7.15am and had been fed and the show was all over by 9.30.  But the girl did say they often come back to the bay in the afternoon, so just keep an eye out for them.

We went for a walk on the small pier, and sure enough, we soon saw a couple of dolphins frolicking around just out a little bit further.  In the time we were there we saw about five at different times.  The place itself is very pretty, the water was again very clear and very blue.  We went for a walk along the beach, wading up to just above ankle height and it was very pleasant.  We were probably there for about an hour before we left and headed back towards Denham (26 km from Monkey Mia), turning off just a few km before we reached Denham and driving into the Peron Heritage Site in the Francois Peron National Park.  This is the site of a former sheep farm, and provides an insight into how life was when the park was a working sheep station. We took the self-guided walk trail around the property, and signage details each section – the history of the area, the shearing shed, shearer’s quarters and stock yards.

A small building depicts stories of indigenous inhabitants, European colonisation and current day conservation programs particularly Project Eden, which has been established to protect the native animals in the area, particularly the bilby.  There is a hot tub there, fed by artesian water at 40 degrees Celsius that originally supplied vital water to the station’s stock.

 There was also a bid of a bird watching walk, so I wandered along there and came to a green corrugated iron wall about 2 mtrs high, with viewing holes cut into it at various heights. There were a couple of wooden benches there to sit on so that you could get to the right height to study the birdlife through the holes.  Well I, being a very keen twitcher (technical term for a birdwatcher) positioned myself at one eye spot and saw nothing, then looked through another and came face to face with an emu.  I immediately realised that he wasn’t alone, so I managed to climb up into one of the benches so that I could look over the top of the wall, which obviously was not what the emus were expecting, so they wandered off out of sight.

By then it was back to camp, cuppas, have a read, then ate tea and here we are now – relaxing.  By lunchtime the wind had dropped significantly, and the afternoon turned out quite warm, so at the moment it is still shorts and t-shirt weather.  I’m not sure what the forecast is for the next few days, but as we are moving slowly southward, I guess the rot has to set in soon.