Monkey Mia is that place in Australia where dolphins come right into the shallows to meet humans. It was obviously a very moving experience for travellers twenty years ago, sitting in the crystal-clear shallows feeding fish to their favourite dolphin and petting them for hours. However, the dolphins got too dependent on being fed, their calves died from neglect, they caught diseases from the close contact and sometimes people got bitten. So now we stand in a line in ankle-deep water, receive a talk from the guide while the dolphins flit about only a few feet away, and then a couple of tourists are picked to feed just a few fish to four specific dolphins. This is absolutely right from the perspective of the dolphins’ welfare, and even if the encounter is now more managed than magical it is wonderful and unique to get so close to the silvery, streamlined, smiling cetaceans.
Tonight however our plans have suddenly become very fluid. To the north of us cyclone Carlos is rampaging along the coast, dumping huge quantities of rain and tearing up the landscape. He’s due to head out to sea rather than turn into our path, but you never know with cyclones. Much more likely is that all the rain he’s dumped on the parched landscape will cause flooding right down the Western Australia coast. Roads north towards our final destination of Exmouth and the Ningaloo Reef are already closed, and while we could carry on to Carnarvon tomorrow in the hope that the roads onwards will re-open, there is just as much chance that we’ll reach Carnarvon only to find that we can’t continue north and that the road to return south is closed behind us. Trapped.
Unless the weather forecast turns very favourable over night, it looks like the Ningaloo Reef will be out of reach on this trip. We’ll have to take the “road more travelled” instead and visit the Great Barrier Reef when we reach eastern Australia.
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