Shark Bay
This place (apparently mia is the word for “shelter” in the local abboriginal dialect) has a rather strange name. No one is quite sure where the “monkey” part of the name came from, though it may be the name of a boat, or pet monkeys early pearl traders had in the area. In any case, it is on Shark Bay, a world heritage site. As we drove in you can see the turquoise water of the bay from several places on the road.
We ate lunch just before we turned off the main highway at Overlander Roadhouse to drive the 150 km in to Monkey Mia. There was a semi-trailer of sheep there, stacked four high, and with no tractor on the trailer. It was pretty warm for us in the motorhome as we ate lunch, so I’m sure the sheep were suffering in the direct sunlight. If the trailer had been moving they’d have been much better off, as they’d get some air flow.
We swam when we arrived here. The water is very salty, and warm, but not hot. Although there were almost no waves, there was a quite strong current moving along the shore. You drifted in it quite quickly, and had to swim hard to go against it.
There are a number of boats anchored off shore. Some of them had been out fishing. We saw one boat which had brought in a number of large fish that they were cleaning.
The most annoying thing about today has been the flies. Tiny little things about 5 mm long, they fly around you constantly, and especially like to land on your face and around your eyes, nose and ears. They would follow us into the truck everytime we got out, so we took to zapping them with Raid after we got back in.