What time is it there?!

After a couple of days in Fremantle we’re back on the road again and heading south. Along the way we got to see some new housing developments, and it seems that even in Australia people want “Luxury Apartments” and “Waterfront Living”. Unfortunately (or maybe this was what they were after), the developers seem to be building something that looks like the worst of the Spanish east coast, or perhaps Playa de las Americas. Nice. We didn’t get any good photos, but when we reached Bunbury we found more so there are a couple in that set of pictures. If the Spanish style architecture doesn't do it for you then you could always choose to stay at the Fawlty Towers motel.....

Bunbury seems quite small but is apparently the second largest city in Western Australia, which really just underlines how few people live in a state that is something like 8 times the size of the UK. The main tourist attraction here is the Dolphin Discovery Centre, a few years ago some dolphins were fed here and their descendants have been returning ever since. You can opt for the $100 ‘Swim with dolphins tour’ if you like, but this just seemed too expensive to us so we opted for the $4 ‘Stand on the beach’ option.

You have to get up early for this, as the dolphins can turn up at any time after about 7:30am. So we were there just before 8, up to our knees in fairly cold water. It was well worth it though as the dolphins arrived on cue and stayed for about half an hour. They are only fed about 200g of fish a day (we were told that an adult daily requirement is around 14kg), so they certainly don’t rely on the food supply. It seems like a social event for them, and they appear to actually enjoy swimming up and down for no reason other than to amuse the weird humans who just stand in the sea watching them.

If you have a mask and snorkel you can go out a bit further in a small group and attempt to watch the dolphins underwater. The visibilty wasn’t that great when I tried this, but you can certainly hear them ‘talking’ to each other when you get your head underwater. Many people also bring children with physical or mental disabilities here, and it seems that the dolphins have figured this out too. They certainly seem to make a point of spending more time with the kids (who are slightly to the side of the main group of spectators).

Note for Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fans: It is of course entirely possible that all this larking about in the shallow water is, as Douglas Adams predicted, just an attempt to warn us of an impending visit by aliens. I did have a quick look around the visitor centre but this doesn’t seem to have been considered.