Today could have been a disaster. We had planned to book the caravan into Minket Mia resort for one night so that we could take full advantage of the sociability of the visiting dolphins without being subjected to the tourist circus that is the official feeding event. However, we awoke to squalling rain showers and on arriving at the resort, found that it was booked out. Ned was devastated because he had been looking forwards to using the park facilities, mainly the games room and the spa. However, he cheered up a bit when we discovered that the games room was in fact only a figment of the website's imagination and that he could use the all the facilities anyway as a day visitor to Monkey Mia. It was 16 bucks to get through the gate even if you were staying in the resort so we considered ourselves lucky in the end as the caravan park was chockers and not
really that nice. The dolphins played nice, cruising past in groups of 5 or so really close to the shore of the sandy bay so that we could get a good look at them. A couple did some impressive ariel leaps and twists which was great thing to see here, in their natural environment instead of within the show ring at places like Seaworld. The weather brightened up a bit towards the end of the day and we relaxed out of the wind with some hot beverages on the comfy chairs of the resort bar and watched the dolphins cruising past. It got so that we didn't want to leave, but our good friends the Walkers from Tom Price had told us that we had to visit the homestead at Francis Perron National Park and check out the artesian hot pool there. So we dragged ourselves away, drove the 12kms back towards Denham and bumped the caravan up the dirt to the homestead. I was expecting a sort of muddy pond(from Debs description ) so you could have knocked me down with a feather, such was my surprise at seeing grassy lawns surrounding a largish circular concrete pool complete with steps and handrails and no mud in site! We jumped in and had a very pleasant couple of hours, lounging in the 40 degree water and eating cheese and crackers! It was very civilised and there was even a little information shed with wonderful full size wildlife models depicting native marsupials such as the spinifex mouse and chudditch ( a sort of spotted native quoll) and some history about the station. The state government purchased Peron station in 1990 and set about turning it in to a haven for some of the rarest and most endangered native animals through Project Eden, seeking to completely eradicate cats, foxes and rabbits from an area of about 150 hectares. So far it's been a great success and we saw our fair share of wildlife. We stayed the night out of town at a free camp called Fowlers Rest, and decided to revisit Francois Peron National Park the next day to explore all the way to the tip of the peninsula.