Rather than coming straight to Denham from Carnarvon, we made a 2 night stop-over at Hamelin Station, a 500,000 acre sheep station at the bottom end of Shark Bay. This is a delightful caravan park on the station, reputed to have the best bathrooms in NW WA….and they would have to be about right. The wider Shark Bay area is one of the driest in Australia, and because there was so little rain last year, the sheep are being agisted in southern WA, so the camp ground is the main business at present. The hospitality shown was excellent, and with 5pm drinks hosted each evening it really does make for a very hospitable and welcoming stay over. Quite surprisingly there is a spring fed lake adjoining the camp ground, attracting abundant bird life that congregates at dusk for feeding.

Enjoying a glass of red lakeside

We enjoined an evening sitting alongside the lake, with binoculars and a glass of red, following the antics and life of an array of birds. Who would have thought it!!

Whilst at Hamelin we visited Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, home to the most diverse and abundant examples of living marine stromalites in the world. Stromalites are living fossils – cyanobacteria, direct descendants of the oldest and simplest form of photosynthetic life on earth, an example of the earliest record of life on earth.

Hamelin Pool Stromalites

They provided the early earth with most of its oxygen atmosphere millions of years before plants appeared. Quite amazing. Hamelin Pool has double the salinity of normal seawater, which is an ideal environment for the stromalites to grow. They look like little pillars and rocks that are different colours, attracting lots of little fish and cormorants. There is an interpretive boardwalk that explains the history and makes it easy to look down on the stromalites. Whilst at Hamelin Pool we also visited the historic telegraph station built in 1884, and the old shell quarry – this whole region has a proliferation of tiny cockles that are metres deep (Shell Beach, one of the main beaches has shells to a depth of 10m) and over time form a limestone full of the shells, known as Coquina. The limestone was mined and used in the construction of a number of buildings.

The local post office and shop at Hamelin Pool

There is also an old post office and shop servicing a small and more basic camp ground.

We arrived in the little seaside town of Denham on Saturday. Denham is really the administrative town and the gateway for tourists for the shire of Shark Bay. About 250,000 pass through here each ‘season’. The town hosts the most westerly hotel in Australia.

The most westerly pub in Australia

It has 4 camp sites and a population of around 600. Its very popular for fishing, and of course for those who know the area, it is the base for many who want to visit Monkey Mia, 25 kms away, to see the bottlenose dolphins which have been coming close to shore for more than 50 years. Rangers now closely supervise the dolphin feeding because the dolphins where relying on only the feeding, and as a result not teaching their young to feed and as a result they would die. The rangers do their controlled feeding in the mornings, and tourists visit to watch this. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to join the throngs – we have seen many dolphins over the years with our sailing adventures, and prefer to see them in a more natural interaction. What we did though want to see was the elusive and shy dugong. Shark Bay is home to 1/8 of the world’s dugong population. The Bay is full of sea grass, the dugongs staple food – they devour up to 30kgs per day.

Jane up forward ‘spotting’ rather unsuccessfully

So we booked a cruise to visit the sea grass beds and hopefully see dugongs in their natural surrounds. Sadly they proved to be too elusive, and we had to suffice with dolphins and turtles instead. The tour operator provides a guarantee that if you aren’t happy with what you saw on the cruise you can come again for free. So today we are going again to see if we can spot one! What we did enjoy however at Monkey Mia was dad emu and chick having a dip in the sea.

Bedraggled dad and bub enjoying a dip

The rangers were very excited, apparently this is something new, never seen before. Seeing an emu on the beach, then having a swim is not what we expect. Here in Denham we do see them wandering around the streets, and in Monkey Mia wandering around the resort and the café, so they are quite used to people and more domestic surrounds.

Yesterday our friends Dearne and Rod joined us here, after last having seen them in Broome. They have ‘caught up with us’ and we will now spend time traveling together down towards Perth. We leave here tomorrow, will spend another night at Hamelin Station, and then move to Kalbarri where we have the combination of beaches and national park to explore.