Day 75- 21 September
ND-
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With no options left to extend our stay in this place of perfection, we packed up our packs, left Monkey Mia and headed south! We had been watching the weather southwards and knew we we heading into wind and rain but we couldn't put off the inevitable any longer.
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We called into the Shark Bay Ocean Park Aquarium for a shark feeding experience and to learn more about the sea life. Happy to go now that we were out of the water!
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MD- "We saw sharks and fish and turtles. The sharks were very big they were three metres"
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GD- The closer the dorsal fin is to the sharks nose the quicker the shark!
Sharks are actually quite lazy and go for slower or injured fish so they don't have to chase after them.
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GD- The number of people killed by sharks a year is five but the number sharks people kill is 100,000 sharks a year. They cut off their fins for fin soup and then throw the alive shark back into the water. People drink the fin soup ( they think it's an afrodisiac) but sharks sweat out their wee and so actually they're just drinking shark wee.
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OD- Stonefish are amazing they don't move for three months. They only eat once every three months!
They are so painfully that apparently you black out from pain. The cure of a stone fish is boliing hot water but you have to put both feet in because the sting is so powerful that if you only put one stung foot in you can burn them as your senses are already overloaded.
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OD- The sea snake is the most venomous in the world. 100 times more venomous than the inland taipan but they are not aggressive and have very poor vision.
Dad asked how the snakes "breathe" but the man thought he said "breed" and started to go into great detail of snake reproduction, Dad went red and said "no Breathe!"
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OD- Clown fish have a symbiotic relationship with anemone. The Clown fish don't get eaten and in turn they feed the anemone.

GD- There's only one female in the Clown fish group and if the queen dies or leaves then the biggest male turns into a female. If she comes back
JD- He wouldn't know if he was Arthur or Martha
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GD- Barramundi at the age of 5, if it's in the sea water, turns into a girl. All Barra are born boys.
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OD- they rescued turtle, it had eaten a plastic bag cause it looked like a jellyfish and turtles like to eat jelly fish. Only one in 2000 baby turtles grow into an adult. Because they have heaps of predators like large birds, sharks and crabs or they can't reach the water fast enough and they just dry out. Turtles can swim really fast. A turtle floats around in the ocean for 5-8 years without coming to shore and when it's time to mate and lay their eggs they come back to the same beach.
Loggerheads are endangered and some don't reach sexually maturity until they are 30 years old!
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ND- once we had learned lots about the many and varied dangers that we had faced and escaped over the past weeks, we hit the road but only for a bit before our next stop at Shell Beach.
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Shell Beach is only one of two beaches in the world made entirely up of shells replacing the sand.
The beach stretches 120 kilometres with shells up to 10 meters deep. Incredibly the beach is made up of shells from just one animal, the Shark Bay cockle-a burrowing mollusc, making it entirely unique.
In years gone by the shells were hard packed, cut into blocks and used to construct many of the historic buildings in Denham.
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Beautiful and white, contrasting the vivid aquamarine water, thankfully we didn't have much time cause not to most comfortable to lye around on.
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Next stop was a slight detour, that we had to u turn back for, as I pointed out to JD this trip is supposed to be educational for the girls who have missed an entire term of school.
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Hamelin Pool reserve which hosts diverse and abundant examples of stromatolites. Stromatolites were the first form of life on Earth, around for more than 3 billion years, formed from single cell organisms.
Apparently "without stromatolites life as we know it would not exist".
This may well be true but it was blowing and at 22degress was not as warm as we were used to and the girls paid little attention to this significant World Heritage Area.
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"They weren't moving and I didn't believe that they were living, they look like rocks, they're just rocks".
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The ocean water temperature in Hamelin Bay has been recorded as 45 degrees during the summer due to extreme salinity, twice as much as the sea.
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On the road again next stop Kalbarri
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Kalbarri as predicted and expected was cold and wet. We got an ensuite site so we didn't have to walk to the bathroom in the rain, breaking ourselves in as slowly and easily as possible to the change in temperature. The girls weren't all that impressed with it as it was rather dated and "Brown!"
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Made use of inside time and the laundry facilities and caught up on washing. Not something we wasted time on in paradise. Washed the beach towels and packed them away.
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Used the beautiful fresh fish Grace scored yesterday to make dinner, most of us really enjoy this!
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Quiet or not so quiet night in. But there is something to be said about rain on the roof at night time.