Shark Bay 1st - 4th June

This is yet another World Heritage Area, our 3rd in Oz and we visited 5 in NZ. One of the reasons why is the presence of stromatolites, which look like rocks in the water, but are in fact clumps of bacteria which produce oxygen and are descendants of organisims from 1800 million years ago.

Apparently we've all got to thank stromatolites for life on earth. The information placard next to them says so. If there weren't for all the good work stomatolites did millions of years ago then nothing on earth would have evolved. So they're very important but also very boring. They don't do much. I suspect even Attenborough would have a job making a watchable sequence out of these.

There's also a great beach made up of millions of tiny cockle shells. But the major tourist attraction in the area is the resort of Monkey Mia, where dolphins swim to the shore every day to be fed by the rangers and tourists. I was one of the lucky chosen ones to give this female dolphin a fish.