In the past few weeks, I have been snorkeling, sightseeing, and driving. Lots of driving. When we arrived back from Africa, we were welcomed back to our home base (aka the Marsh’s home) by the Marsh family. Our original plan was to get our campervan and head out across Australia to Byron bay (a little surf town that is awesome and that we loved last time we came to Oz), but we ended up getting our campervan and driving north, up to the Ningaloo coral reef area. We visited Coral Bay, Exmouth, and Monkey Mia. In the “town” of Coral Bay, there is a pub, a bakery, a general store, two campgrounds, and lots of tour places. The beach there is amazing. The coral reef is 20-30 meters off the sandy white beach, so you just walk right up to it and snorkel. Me and my dad went snorkeling a lot, and we saw sting rays, coral, and of course, fish! It was really cool, but what was cooler happened the next day. We had booked a tour to go snorkeling, so we got to the boat and loaded on with another couple from Toronto, and then headed off doing 360’s in a zodiac. We got to our first snorkel site, and , well, a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Here’s what happened…
Our next stop was Exmouth, which is famous for the whale sharks that come there to feed. We were a little too early to see them, but we did see another turtle while snorkeling off the shore, so that was awesome. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are like, seven trillion flies per square meter, so I was ready to go south pretty quick to get out of the heat and the flies. We invested in a 59 cent fly swatter, and I’m sure fly heaven got filled up pretty quick.
Monkey Mia was our last stop in the north part of Western Australia. They are suuuuuper famous for their dolphin “interaction.” Sounds pretty touristy right? That’s because it is. I didn’t really ant to go there, but of course the rest of my family was like, it’s a world heritage site, and you get to feed wild dolphins! Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for dolphins and world heritage sites and all that jazz, but feeding wild dolphins while a bunch of people push you to get a photo and touch the dolphin when that’s illegal is not my thing. Anyways, I’m sure you can read all about it in Kali’s blog, but I’ll just tell you about our campground, emus, and dugongs. Our campground was near the ocean and there are a lot of pesky emus. One night, we were BBQing (Oh yeah, forgot to tell you boys, I’m having BBQ every night, Ha Ha!) dinner, and then the people next to us brought out some white bread and put it on the picnic table, and an emu snatched it off the table. The lady totally freaked out, and screamed, and tried to take the loaf back, but then the emu dumped all of the slices on the ground, and then his buddies came to eat it. By then the lady’s husband had come out with a mini butterfly net and was trying to catch their heads or something. It was pretty funny, and I just stood back.
On our last day in Monkey Mia, we booked a boat tour to go see dolphins, dugongs, and turtles. The boat we took had two big nets you could sit on and watch the water underneath you. We saw one dugong (sort of like a manatee) and tons of dolphins. Some of them even played around the boat, and when we were going fast, they would ride in front or beside the front of the boat, and sitting on the nets you were right above them, and it was amazing. The dugong was really far away, and we only saw him for a minute. Anyways, we went back to Perth and to home base, but I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.
Bye for now!
Lia
Ps. I’m looking forward to BBQ pizza tonight…
I'll try to post again soon because this was about 3 weeks ago, but it took so long to get internet that didn't take forever!