Western Australia Trip - Pt 2

After we picked up the motorhome, we did exciting things like find a supermarket to shop for food etc to stock the van. That actually was more exciting than it sounds as the van was obviously bigger than a normal car so parking was an adventure :)

Our 1st full day we caught the ferry over to Rottnest Island, 18km off the coast of WA. It's a reserve, so no private land ownership is allowed, and it's full of history and gorgeous scenery. We caught a bus tour around the island, as well as taking some time to walk around the settlement area.

And for me, the main attraction are the quokkas, small macropods native to the area. They are the cutest things ever and many on the island are quite tame. Some of these cheeky ones were coming right up to sniff the camera (most shots taken by Billy).

We couldn't resist buying our own toy quokka (since we weren't allowed to smuggle a real one off the island!)

The next day we travelled to Bunbury, where we stopped at the Dolphin Discovery Centre. Wild dolphins regularly come into the bay where the centre is, but unfortunately we weren't lucky enough to see any that day. We did get to look at their aquariums with gorgeous seahorses, starfish and octopi, as well as view the dolphin information displays. It was quite an impressive place for something entirely run by volunteers.

On the way out to dinner, we stopped to look at the Bunbury lighthouse. I'm not sure if there's anything significant about it other than its paint job! I remember seeing it as a kid so it was nice to show it to Billy.

Our Dolphin centre entry fees entitled us to go back to the centre 3 times, so we called in there the next morning in the hope that we'd see dolphins this time. We watched feeding time in the aquarium and then were lucky enough to see some dolphins - WAY out in the bay. Binoculars helped! Billy did manage to capture one in one photo - see the black dot around the middle of the photo :)

We then headed down the coast to Busselton. More later...