Day 5 of the Western Australian adventure: Denham

We got up pretty early as today was our longest drive of the week, from The Priory in Dongara to Denham in Shark Bay- 500km or so. We did the normal- made lunch, ate breakfast and hit the road before 8am. The drive was a bit of a bore, the highlight of which was a stop for petrol and an ice cream. Lucia was doing her normal helpful navigation, where she props the map against the window to provide some shade, then falls asleep.

The scenery was lovely, nothing as far as you can see and the deep red sand for which Australia is famed lining either side of the road. The problem is the scenery didn't change for the full five hours; the only thing to break the vast expanse of bugger-all was the occasional dead roo, or the slightly luckier soon-to-be-dead roo.
We arrived at the backpackers lodge at about 2pm. The accommodation was basic, but clean. We had a room to ourselves and were sharing a communal area with a couple of others. After unpacking we went to harass the local visitors centre who were very helpful with ideas for what we could do with our time in Denham.

That afternoon we went to 'Ocean Park' which offered a guided tour around some aquariums containng an array of Shark Bay's marine life- including a fair few varieties of shark (Tiger Shark, Lemon Shark, Nervous Shark (yes...because it's nervous!)) which we saw being fed.

On the way home we went via Little Lagoon to watch the sun set. The Little Lagoon is an almost perfectly circular pool of water sitting just in land, with a small estuary connecting it to the sea. I went snorkelling, which proved both challenging (as the water was ankle deep at it's deepest point) and pointless (as nothing exciting lives in water as deep as the average puddle). The sunset was lovely though, and we have lots of pictures to prove it!

On the way home we went via a cafe for a scrummy, if a little expensive dinner. Again, it was another early night, but we intended to get up at 6am the following day to drive to Monkey Mia to view the feeding of the dolphins. We wanted to get there early to beat the Chinese, who have a similar reputation to the Germans and their deckchairs.