January 24 – Dolphins and Thrombolites

We left quite early today for the hour and a half drive to Bunbury where we are visiting the beach.

The main attraction is the dolphins.  Bunbury Bay has a pod of about 120 or so dolphins and a few of them routinely come up to the beach to greet the tourists.  They usually come in around 9:00 or so in the morning so we didn’t want to miss them.

We arrived in time but today the dolphins were in no hurry to visit the tourists.  One lone dolphin, Eclipse, arrived around 10:30.  The tourists dutifully lined up about 15 feet into the surf to watch Eclipse.  

She swam back and forth in front of us and occasionally popped her head up to check us out.  She stayed for 15 or 20 minutes and then left.  It was pretty exciting.

The dolphins are not fed or in any other way enticed to the shore.  They come because they apparently enjoy the interaction with people. 

The only other stop we have planned is Lake Clifton to see the thrombolites.  Thrombolites are an ancient microscopic lifeform that forms hard deposits, a bit like coral.  They are credited with helping to increase the oxygen levels in the air which allowed other life to form on the planet.   

Lake Clifton was itself very pretty...very blue.The park had built a boardwalk into the lake to help protect they very fragile thrombolites.  

They made for interesting formation on the shore of the lake.

We were back in Perth by mid-afternoon.  We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and headed out to turn in our car.  We needed to get gas for the car so did a google search.  Not sure what happened but the first two places we selected turned out not to be gas stations.  We eventually found a station to fill up and then dropped the car off and walked into downtown for a snack of ice cream. 

We have much to do in repacking and catching up on things, so the rest of the afternoon was spent in the room.  We had dinner at the adjacent On the Rocks bar and then it was back to the room.