I enjoyed my day in the Shark Bay region. I enjoyed Nanga Bay, Shell Beach, Eagle Bluff, Denham, Little Lagoon and Hamelin Pool.
I was a bit disappointed with Monkey Mia and a bit ambivalent about the dolphin experience.
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| Shell Beach |
I guess I had the impression that Monkey Mia was in a pristine wilderness. Instead it's very much a resort destination with all that goes with it.
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| Eagle Bluff |
I guess I also had a naive, romantic view that the dolphins and the humans interacted with a mutual curiousity -- a sort of meeting of the minds. In fact the dolphins are lured in by feeding them fish, a practice that started a fair while ago and has since been shown to be very detrimental to their wellbeing.
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| Denham |
To ameliorate these issues they now limit the feeding events to 3 a day, limit the amount they are fed and restrict which dolphins get fed. Supposedly this has been a success. It remains a thoroughly artificially orchestrated event. I think we now know better and should just abandon it. The trouble is that for each of these feeding events, hundreds of paying customers turn up.
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| Hamelin Pool stromatolites |
Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I didn't see a dolphin, and wasn't likely to unless I rolled in at 7:45am. Of course this only becomes obvious after you've already paid your $12 park entry fee. The choice then is, "Do I come back tomorrow morning?" A lot of people do -- a double win for the NPWS.
