Day 6 of the Western Australian adventure: Monkey Mia

Today was a big day: the reason we had wanted to visit Monkey Mia was because it is the world's most reliable destination for dolphin visitation.

For the past forty years, dolphins have visited the shores of Monkey Mia every morning. Unfortunately they choose to do it very early: around 7:30am so it meant an early rise for us.

I set my alarm the night before for 6am - as soon as it went off we were up and rushing to get ready as we wanted to ensure we would be close enough to see the dolphins. Turns out my phone was still on Sydney time and Sydney is two hours ahead of Perth...big boo boo....it was actually 4am.Urrrghh what were we going to do for the next three and a half hours?!?! We decided to set off anyway and were at Monkey Mia by 5:30am. I slept in the car whilst Dave entertained himself watching The Inbetweeners.

Finally it was time to go down to the shore to see the dolphins and despite being there so early, we were still some of the last people to turn up as the dolphins had decided to come early that morning. We managed to sneakily push ourselves towards the front and we were lucky enough to be incredibly close to them. The resort feed the dolphins around three times each morning and choose people from the crowd to do so - they chose me, yay, and here I am feeding one of the dolphins a fish (which left my hand very smelly afterwards!)

By the time the dolphin feeding was over and they had left the shore it was only 9am. Despite having had breakfast we were now very hungry (our breakfast had been 5 hours ago afterall) so we settled down in the Monkey Mia cafe and had a second, healthy breakfast of fruit toast and fruit salad. We had decided to hire a boat and have a picnic on the water for lunch so we spent the next few hours soaking up the sun and reading - absolutely blissful.

We took the boat out at around 11am for a couple of hours, had lunch and a swim. On taking it back to the shore the friendly boatman said we could keep the boat as long as we wanted so long as we moored ourselves out in the sea and came in if he needed the boat. Another few hours spent on the water reading, relaxing and swimming. We only came in when a massive wave hit the boat and absolutely soaked my half of it. Not good. The rest of the day was spent milling around waiting for the cultural Aboriginal experience we had booked the previous day.

At 6:30pm the slightly intimidating Aboriginal man turned up with two didgeridoos and a bag full of Aboriginal stuff. We walked to a nearby campfire which he had set up and sat around it ready for some Dreamtime stories and freshly caught mullet cooked on the fire (which was delicious). It was really quite interesting - he gave us a very condensed history of the Aboriginals in Western Australia, his family and their culture, taught us some Aboriginal language and also played the didgeridoo for us. A different way to spend an evening that's for sure!