We are now at Denham which is a world heritage area, or more famously about 30klms from Monkey Mia. Monkey Mia is of course where the dolphins arrive daily in the shallow waters of the beach. The dolphins have been coming right up to the waters edge for more than 50 years. Originally they were fed by the local fisherman, but as time passed their numbers were declining as they had forgotton the skill to hunt for themselves. In stepped the wildlife people and now each dolphin only gets 2 small fish each day. A dolphin requires about 12kg of fish daily, therefore they are now required to self sustain there daily requirements.

We arrived about 7.30am in time for the first dolphins to turn up. Within about 10 minutes 3 dolphins turned up on the shoreline. The staff then invite everyone into the water up to their knees. They then spend about 15 minutes giving us a complete history of Monkey Mia and talking about the dolphins, all this time the dolphins are casually swimming backwards and forwards along the shoreline about 2 metres in front of everyone. Then everyone is asked to step back completely out of the water which is the signal that the dolphins are about to get a feed. A handful of people are then selected to feed the dolphins a fish. Naturally I was the first person selected out of about 253 people, they have had up to 750 people show up on one day to feed a dolphin. I'm sure it was my good looks that got me selected, or perhaps they saw my tears rolling down my cheek, but anyway I was first. So basically you drop a fish right in the dolphins mouth, and hope the pesky pelicans don't grab it, it was awesome. Lynette also got picked to feed a dolphin, but in this case the pelican won the battle and her dolphin missed out.

One of the Dolphins that was first to arrive has been turning up at Monkey Mia every day (except for 5 or 6) since 1976. Thats an amazing stat, and remember these are wild animals and can basically go where ever they want. Currently there are 21 named dolphins that regularly turn up. They can tell each individual dolphin by the markings on their dorsal fin,

We also visited the Francois Peron sheep station. This station was handed back to Parks WA in 1991 after the 99 year lease expired. It has a well preserved shearing shed, but the highlight is the artesian bore which bubbles 40 degree hot water from a depth of 500 metres into a nice hot tub. It was very relaxing and soothing dangling our legs in the water. We also spotted a mother emu with her five chicks. The station struggled as a sheep station simply due to lack of water and the harsh country, which was difficult to muster the sheep. They also weren't very smart building the shearing shed directly behind the pub in Denham. They found it difficult getting the shearers to work a full day as they would constantly drift over to the pub in their breaks and not return. Generally by about 3.00pm, there was no-one shearing sheep as they were all in the pub. They eventually fixed this by moving the shearing shed 10klms out of town.

We went to visit Shell Beach. This beach is completely void of sand and is entirely shells. The shells are up to 10 metres deep at various points and are very small. Some of the buildings in the town of Denham are made from bricks made from these shells. The beach was very bright due to the sun reflection from these little white cockle shells and you are not allowed to remove the shells. Also because of the high salinity of the water they say if you normaly cannot float in the ocean, you will in there.

While we were in Denham they had the French Festival celebrating 200 years of the French expedition to the region.

At last we are starting to get some cooler weather. Basically since we hit Mataranka around the 6th of July we have endured temperatures around the mid 30's. Thats about 2 and a half months ago, today is mid 20's and we are now heading for Perth, so should be a little bit cooler there. We'l probably start complaining and want to head back to the heat.

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