So… after a successful night of free-camping at Hamelin Pool we enjoyed a good breakfast of roadhouse bacon and eggs from the the Overlander Roadhouse before setting off to Denham for seven nights. We chose to stay at Denham instead of Monkey Mia after hearing numerous opinions that Monkey Mia was over priced and underwhelming…
The Seagulls had arrived in Denham a few days before us so we caught up with them once again and we pleased to find that our site was beside theirs, which makes it much easier for happy hour and socialising in general. The site itself was quite spacious consisting of hard packed shell grit. The park was arranged in big open tier levels and so very easy to manoeuver and setup.
Denham itself came as a surprise paket to all of us. Although not a large place it had everything you need with a long main street of shops and cafes on one side with park area and beach on the other. The Shark Bay Hotel, located centrally on the main street has the distinction of being the most westerly pub in Australia and we enjoyed a meal and drinks there with the Seagulls as you must.
The bay side of the main street was a picture postcard with grassy park areas fronting onto the shallow beach. The water was once again that stunning aquamarine colour that seems to be all down the W.A. coastline. An old pearl lugger sits calmly anchored about 50m offshore as a point of interest and there are boats moored all around the bay area. It looks like a fishermans paradise but also has a whole lot of other interesting places to explore as well.
We did want to try and tke a trip to Dirk Hartog Island, a large island off the coast where the Dutch trader, Dirk Hartog, landed in 1616 and famously nailed an inscribed pewter plate to a post declaring his visit. Rob was hoping to visit the landing site… alas it is not a simple process to get there. You can take your own car over on a short ferry trip that is notoriously unreliable and costly that also involves a 100km dodgy 4WD road to Useless Loop or you can take a much longer boat ride across (sans car), which we were also told is notoriously unreliable. In the end we decided it was probably not worth the cost or effort and chose no to…
Denham on the whole was an absolutely beaut place to stay and did leave a very lasting impression on us being one of our favourite spots so far, especially given that we weren’t expecting much from it to begin with. We thought the Monkey Mia was the attraction for this region when in fact Denham was the star location.
Not far from Hamelin Pool at the start of the Shark Bay Peninsula and 100km from Denham is the Hamelin Pool Nature Reserve, which is home to an area of stromatalites. Stromatalites are a type of microbial mat. They’re and ancient form of life the build up over time as small mounds of varying height and diameter at the water’s edge.
We stopped in for a look on the way into Denham. There was a boardwalk built so that you can get up close to them that was unfortunately closed due to cyclone damage in previous years. Despite being fenced off Rob judged that the first section of boardwalk was still perfectly viable and so jumped the fence to get some closer pictures.
A sign at the boardwalk said that it was due to be repaired this year but we subsequently learned that it may not proceed due to environmental heritage pressures and the fragile nature of the stromatalites, which are easily damaged by uncaring tourists seeking close-up pictures… Rob, of course, took great care to stay only on the boardwalk structure.
It was interesting to see these ancient formations, which occur in W.A. due to the hypersaline conditions of the Indian Ocean in places where the water is shallow and sheltered. Hopefully they remain intact and subject to as little disturbance in the future as possible.
Monkey Mia is only 25km from Denham and is an obvious place to visit even though it is receiving much negative review in recent times. We were told that the famous ‘wild dolphin’ feeding still occurs everyday but has been reduced to a paid experience where everyone is roped off away from the dolphins. One or two ‘authorised handlers’ take two (only) fish to the dolphins and give one each to two of the ‘matriarch’ dolphins and that is all you get for the price of admission. There is no more swimming with the dolphins, etc. This may be the right thing for the dolphins but… if so… then we would think that it should be cancelled altogether or left to the dolphins to decides if they want to be fed… It all smells of tourist trap rip-off to us and just about everybody else we spoke to so we decided not to waste our money on it.
That said… Shark Bay is also home to one of the largest populations of dugongs. The Seagulls had sussed out a half-day cruise of Shark Bay that included dolphin and dugong watching. We booked a couple of spots with them and took one of the most memorable sailing cruises we have ever done.
Seeing dugongs in the wild is a bucket list item for us and whilst the cruise did not guarantee a dugong sighting that were pretty confident that we would. They delivered in spades… We saw over a dozen dugongs, some with calves, throughout the cruise and marvelled at these beautiful, very chill, sea mammals, of which not very much is still known.
Our cruise guide told us that there have been thousands of marine biologists studying dolphins in the area over the years but only a dozen or so studying the dugongs. This is a travesty of science because much is known about dolphins and they’re not threatened as a species. Dugongs on the other hand are a threatened species and rely solely on the diminishing, fragile sea grass meadows in a few places around the Australian coast line.
Bloody dolphins get all the funding and attention… We also learnt that despite the friendly, happy nature of dolphins that we all see and are shown that dolphins can also pretty nasty, vicious critters amongst themselves. The Shark Bay dolphins hang around in small pods, they call gangs, and regularly fight amongst themselves for superiority in turf wars. This was evident from the numberof dolphins that we saw half-missing dorsal fins and wounds that were inflicted by other dolphins, not sharks.
Our cruise guide also classed the Shark Bay dolphins as the laziest in the world; too lazy to do more than about 10 seconds of bow-riding at the front of the catamaran. To be fair… the dugongs don’t do anything other than come up for air and dive back down again but you sort of expect more from dolphins than this lot seem prepared to give.
The cruise itself was excellent. All the more so because it was fully under sail and such was the skill of our guide that he was able to steer a big cat under sail over to where a dugong was spotted in the distance without spooking it and getting us close enough to see these beautiful, shy creatures up close. Fun fact… the dugong is vulnerable to predators on it’s underbelly so if attacked it will dive to the sea floor and lay on it’s belly presenting the super tough skin on it’s back to the predator. The skin is so tough that sharks cannot penetrate it. In fact it is so tough that settlers would use the dugong skin as brake-liners on carts back when they were hunted.
We had such a pleasant day cruise that we booked again for a sunset cruise the following evening and enjoyed floating happy hour with the Seagulls watching the sun set over the ocean under sail. This was a very happy time for Sandy and Gary who previously owned a motor cruiser back home and spent many happy hours on their own boat…
So… all in all, we took two trips to Monkey Mia. It is a very pretty place but it has become a highly regulated tourist trap, which spoils it in many respects. We were very glad that we chose to camp in Denham and just visit Monkey Mia. The cruise(s) were terrific value for money and seeing wild dugongs is a lifetime memory…
Eagle Bluff Lookout
Before visiting Ocean Park Aquarium, about 10km south of Denham, we drove further down to Eagle Bluff Lookout. This is a curved, steeply angled cliff about 100m in height. In contrast to the red earth cliffs along a lost of the coast, Eagle Bluff is a sandy off-white colour.
The lookout provides a magnificent panoramic vista down to the water and out over the ocean. The face of the bluff is steeply raked at an angle that would not be impossible to scale down but would be an extremely difficult climb back up if you were silly enough to do it.
From the vantage point of the bluff you can peer down into the clear shallow water and see a number of sharks cruising around the shallows. It was very hard to determine their size but we would guess that they could have been in the range of 2m in length. It really is something to see sharks in the wild from on high like that. You can see how they just cruise effortlessly around their territory doing the rounds and conducting their business.
Ocean Park Aquarium
The Seagulls had already been to Ocean Park Aquarium and suggested we should make a visit. It was a complete surprise. Built on the edge of the water is has a cafe and gift shop but is home to a number of tanks and ocean ponds containing a vast array of marine species.
We opted for a guided tour, which was well worth it, to learn some very interesting facts about fish behaviour and how much more intelligent we are than we give dredit to.
The first stage of the tour is inside a large shed structure housing a few vertical glass tanks as well as a number of circular concrete tanks, each housing a variety of fish species. The round concrete tanks were about waist high so you could walk up to the edge and look onto the fish as opposed to through a sheet of glass. The boxfish and the lionfish were absolute characters… They knew they were being observed and had developed a number of behaviours that were quite comical and entertaining.
The round tanks also contained a highly venomous sea snake, which we were told would escape occasionally, as well as sizable eel that would play hide and seek in the various nooks and crannies inside the tank.
The ocean pond area was a large lagoon area containing an array of sizable fish and stingrays as well as a number of quite large sharks of various species. The lagoon was round in shape with a central rotunda area accessed by a small bridge. Crossing the bridge you got to see the sharks up close and personal as they glided under the bridge. It was a bit like the set of a ‘James Bond villian site’.
The tour included a feeding session where the guide would lower a fish carcass to the water from the bridge and bounce it around on the surface to get the sharks interested. About six or seven sharks would circle around it for a minute or so until one them decided to take it. It was a very impressive display and very cool to be standind right above it.
The other main exhibit was a large round metal tank containing various species of reef fish. The guide would feed the fish and one of the fish had taught itself to squirt the guide with a mouthful of water, like archer fish, to get the guide’s attention. A couple of the other fish were also learning how to do this, which again was a highly unexpected behaviour these fish were teaching themselves.
Visiting the Ocean Park Aquarium was a very pleasant and enjoyable activity made all the more so by an excellent lunch of, yep, fish’n’chips sitting on the cafe’s deck overlooking the beach and ocean. A place well worth the cost of admission…
Denham is adjacent to Francois Peron National Park. You head towards Monkey Mia, past Little Lagoon and turn off onto an unsealed road that takes you to Peron Station and Big Lagoon. We took a day trip there to see the historic station and also to visit Big Lagoon and pristine waterways.
Francois Peron National Park
Francois Peron National Park was named after François Péron, a French naturalist and explorer
Between Dirk Hartog Island and Francois Peron National Park you begin to see the much broader visitation to Australia by Europeans other than the British colonial invasion. The Dutch frequently visited the W.A. coast in the 1600’s as part of the spice route to the East Indies. François Péron was a later visitor in 1801-1803 and made a huge contribution to the cataloguing of Australian fauna.
The national park was created from an earlier pearling camp and sheep station. Peron Station, now the Peron Heritage Precinct, is the site of the sheep station and is kept as a historical site complete with buildings, some old equipment and an outdoor artesian hot tub, You can still take a dip in the hot tub if you wish but in 40° heat with the water temperature being at ‘hot bath level’ we opted to stay dry. The water colour was a little off-putting as well.
You wander around the station precinct at your leisure. Their is a small discovery building at the entrance that houses indigenous information and displays including an indigenous brush shelter and a number of stuffed animal displays including a feral cat and fox.
From their you can visit the artesian hot tub, the shearing shed and yarding pens, the shearer’s quarters, the stables and a number of antique farming implements. The station itself is very scrubby land, as you would expect, set on sandy red earth. You do get a very firsthand look at the hardships and privations of life in the 1800’s in a such a remote place as it would have been back then. It’s good to know that these places are kept and maintained and still open to visitors.
Big Lagoon
The drive to Big Lagoon from Peron Station is definitely 4WD along a rutted sandy track and you are highly advised to drop your tires air pressure before you start. They even provide a couple of compressor stations at the start of the track so you can re-inflate your tires on return.
Unlike Little Lagoon, which is an enclosed circular tidal lagoon outside the national park, Big Lagoon is a coastal waterway with a bush style campground and a number of shade structures for visitors.
The lagoon waterway is quite large and broad with stunning variations of blue water based on the various currents and depths. The Seagulls had visited on a different day to us and were lucky to spot another dugong in the water while they were there. Alas we were not so lucky.
We did take the opportunity though to put the drone up and get some aerial photos of this very beautiful and natural place. Fishing in the lagoon is prohibited north of the campground so as to create a valuable fish nursery in there but is allowed at the south end and we did see one or two tinnies making their way back to the campground.
It would be a lovely spot to camp (in a tent or camper trailer) but it was one of the few places we have come across that was thick with flies, of the sticky variety, that are just plain annoying. Flying the drone was made a little more difficult by having to constantly wave them away from your face whilst trying to guide the drone, which we have finally named ‘Dexter’ around the shoreline.
Big Lagoon was well worth the lumpy drive to get their and the annoyance of deflating and re-inflating tires in the hot sun. It’s one of those unexpected places that we had never heard about and you delight in discovering when it presents you with the opportunity.