Life is full of opportunities

We have been back in Perth for over three weeks and a lot has happened.

We no longer have our Palamino and Ranger rig. We have sold them as we are now Perth based until March 2023. Instead our travels will be more local within Perth and the South West of WA. What will this new lifestyle feel like, in the transition from wild remote places to city living?

At first there was a sense of shock and of loss. Perth is a moderately sized city with about 2 million people. To us country folk used to sharing national parks with whales and no people, we felt we had lost our connection to the wide open spaces. We have loved our connection to nature and a simple, wild life. Part of the nomadic lifestyle has been the ability to roam more or less as we please.

That said, we have been blessed with so many things in the short time we have been back.

The main one has been finding a beach. No shortage of pristine sand and sea in Perth, but we wanted a quiet beach where in the middle of summer in a city we could feel at one with nature and not hemmed in.

As you can see from the photos, it isn’t a bad beach (that’s English irony- it’s a actually really beautiful).

Then there is pet sitting. It has been a year since we house sat Chops, the indoor cat in Darwin. Now we have Miles and Tinkerbell and a lovely house near our favourite beach, how blessed are we?

There has been something else as well. We have just had our second wedding anniversary, and we have found that what has been the best thing about being in Australia, is being together. Whether is be admiring sunsets, being frustrated when things don’t go as planned, or whatever it may be, we can experience it together. Indeed our wedding motto is ‘whatever together’.

What that means is that we can get it right even when we get it wrong. Our journey together is an opportunity for learning, the chance to use mistakes as lessons in being closer to each other. How blessed are we?

The smiles in the photo are genuine. For Noel’s 64th birthday we went to a vegan restaurant in Fremantle. From the moment we arrived to when we left everything was perfect. The meal left a wonderful glow in both of us, a feeling of a special treat, a luxury. A lovely way to celebrate Noel’s birthday.

Dolphin volunteering- our last wildlife gig

We are now back in Perth, having finished volunteering for DBCA. Our final gig was working at Monkey Mia as dolphin volunteers and beach patrollers.

These photos were taken by rangers, fellow volunteers and ourselves – can’t remember exactly who took which but very grateful to all!

Monkey Mia is a small resort within the world heritage site of Shark Bay. The bay is very environmentally rich with many species of shark, dugongs, turtles, sting rays but is famous for its resident wild dolphins.

The Shark Bay dolphin research project began in 1982 and is the second longest dolphin research study in the world.

Our job, as volunteers, was helping with the morning ‘dolphin experience’. Each morning began with getting up at sunrise around 5.30am and checking the bay with binoculars to spot any dolphins and noting their movements.

From 7am each day we helped get ready for the dolphin experience – putting out signs for visitors, logging data on tides, weather and visitor numbers and preparing the correct amount of fish for each dolphin in the fish room.

The dolphins are wild, and spend most of their day feeding out in the bay. It’s entirely up to them whether they choose to come on and be fed.

This generates a lot of anticipation and unpredictability in the run up to each dolphin experience, with lots of communication on the two way radios to try to work out if and when they will arrive and when to bring the fish down.

Piccolo and Kya are the two female dolphins who choose to come in on most days. Both are heavily pregnant. Wading out into the water to feed them was a strangely moving experience. They seem to actively enjoy interaction with humans, nudging the volunteer with their rostrum (nose) or rubbing their beautifully soft and smooth belly against the human’s legs. Piccolo appears to be a natural comic- taking a fish and posing with it hanging out of her mouth like a cigar. Rolling sideways in the shallow water means a dolphin’s eye is above the water which lets them get a proper close look at the strange human creatures. They often choose to hold prolonged eye to eye contact, and the sense of their keen intelligence feels remarkable.

As an example, within Shark Bay, the dolphins have learned to forage for natural sponges and place them over their rostrum (nose) as a kind of glove- so they can rootle around in the silt for food- a rare example of strategic tool use.

Monkey Mia combines a high earning RAC beachside resort, the Parks and Wildlife dolphin reserve, university led dolphin research project, and a jetty and car park for fishermen and boat owners maintained by the local Shire authority- all within a few metres of one other. This is a tricky juxtaposition. Rules on dolphin- human interaction are strict to try to minimise impact on the dolphins. A key part of our role was making evening beach patrols to ensure that resort visitors were keeping dogs on leads, and that if dolphins were cruising the shallows for fish, swimmers and paddle boarders kept 50m away and fishermen brought in their lines to avoid entanglement with dolphins or pelicans.

On our afternoons off, we walked east from the resort, wading into the sandy shallows where baby sharks and metre long sting rays hung out.

After dark, turtles surfaced quietly in the water between the jetties, and the moonlight lit up the moored sail boats, with the occasional squid shooting like a torpedo through the shallows or an eagle ray leaping from the water.

We are now back in Perth- with wonderful memories to treasure. We have just begun a house sit with 2 cats – so very different type of animals to care for but just as full of personality!