FriendlyBrooks

So much to see, so beautiful – we may need another lap

Lance Brooks, marine wildlife and 4×4 lover, May 2026

The big 5 are sharks, dolphins, rays, turtles and dugongs. We easily ticked these off and so much more in what would turn out to be an incredible 10 days in the area.

The drive from Kalbarri to Monkey Mia is quite long and boring with only one roadhouse along National Highway 1 where you can stop and refuel. Once onto Shark Bay Rd its a further 150 km drive, although the scenery does improve. We stopped at a couple but not all the lookouts, thinking that we would have an opportunity to go back to these later.

We were not able to get into the campground at Monkey Mia so we instead booked a budget room in the resort, which meant we had to share a bathroom with people in the next door room. Lucky for us there was no one in the room the first night and if they were there the next night we never crossed paths. I have to say it was nice to have a little mini break from setting up the camper for a couple of nights. Once checked in we immediately went to the beach where we watched the sunset and Lance swam (of course,).  We went to the beachside bar to watch the last of the light fade and had dinner.

On our first morning Lance took himself off to yoga and we arranged to meet at the jetty to watch the dolphin experience at 7.45am. Monkey Mia has a resident population of thousands of dolphins, they have identified and named 1800. They regularly swim right up on the shore and most particularly in the morning when the rangers feed them. I was on a call with Michelle and the kids when Lance rang and said hurry down now, the dolphins are already here – half an hour early. Obviously the dolphins didn’t read the activity board! The dolphin experience was really great and there were about 10 dolphins swimming right up to the sand. A couple of the older females are fed by the rangers. It used to be that people could hand feed them on their own but research showed that wasn’t very good for the dolphins so now they carefully select who gets the fish and how often and how much. This way the dolphins still do their normal wild hunting. Whilst we were on the jetty we also saw turtles swimming by.

After the dolphin experience we had breakfast at the resort restaurant, which was hugely crowded as everyone piled in at the same time. We finished breakfast just in time for our sailing cruise which the kids gave me for Mother’s Day (a day early). The sailing cruise was fantastic. We followed dolphins around the bay and visited an osprey pair which had made their huge best on the pearl farming barge. Then we sailed 5km offshore to the seagrass bed in search of dugongs. We were lucky enough to see a mother and calf and one other dugong. There’s a population of about 10,000 dugongs in shark bay, the largest in the world. They feed on seagrass and Shark Bay-has the largest growth of seagrass in the world, although sadly it’s diminishing. On the way back to shore a small group of us sat in the boom net and got towed along behind the boat. Great fun!

Once back on shore we bought a picnic lunch to eat by the beach. Unfortunately Lance went for a swim, of course, and I was on the phone to Mum and so didn’t notice the flock of seagulls that ate half of it. After we placated ourselves with half a lunch we did something we hardly ever have a chance to do – lay on the beach and read.  In the late afternoon just before another magnificent sunset, another group of dolphins came in chasing fish along the sand line.

We had dinner in the restaurant that night which was very nice. The next morning we got up early so we could be at the dolphin experience early. While we were waiting for our coffee the dolphins came in,. This time we stood on the beach and the dolphins came right up to us. One in particular swam only a foot away staring straight at us. It was an incredible experience.

After the experience we had a family call for Mother’s Day. It was lovely speaking to everyone. While we were speaking the dolphins came back and Lance managed to show everyone the dolphins swimming below his feet.

We packed up and got going by 10am and drove to Denham, just half an hour away. We did a shop at the small, not well stocked IGA as we were going to be off grid for the next 6 nights. We also refuelled and filled our water. We had to drive about 25km to our campsite at Big Lagoon in the Francois Peron national park. This was our first proper sand drive with our van. I was a little nervous beforehand. We aired down (18psi) at the start of the park, as we were advised to do. While we were doing this a group of young French travellers were asking if they really needed a 4×4 as their car had the 4×4 option broken. We told them that the signs said 4×4 only and to air down. They didn’t seem to want to listen. Later we found out that they caused an accident as they couldn’t control the car going too fast down a sandy hill. 

Big Lagoon is a beautiful campground with availability for about 16 vehicles. There are camp hosts who we met on the first afternoon when we climbed the lookout for the sunset. That evening we also met up with the family, Bronwyn, Dave and their kids who we met in Sandy Cape. They had been at Big Lagoon for a couple of days already and had done a snorkeling trip that they recommended so we booked ourselves into that. We also met  another family from the Shire in Sydney who were eating their dinner on the waterfront in the 7 minutes between the flies leaving for the day and the moths arriving for the evening. They told us they had driven to Steep Point, where we were planning on going in a few days time. The road to Steep Point is notoriously bad but this couple said it was easier than driving the Stockton sandhills. So our (my) confidence grew somewhat.

Our first day at Big Lagoon was spent relaxing around camp, doing a bit of work and keeping away from the flies 😕. We took the kayak out for a paddle up the lagoon in the afternoon. We had arranged to have sunset drinks on the waterfront with Bronwyn and Dave and the sunset put on a magic show for us. We had enjoyed Bronwyn and Dave’s company and were sad to realise that we may not catch up with them again.

Another suggestion from Bronwyn and Dave was to drive up to Cape Peron and Skipjack Point. We did this the next day. It’s a 50km drive through sand, which is at times quite thick, and also across a couple of salt lakes. At the point we were treated to more spectacular views where the red cliffs meet the sand. We walked down a steep sandhill for a swim and saw dolphins swimming just a few metres away. At Skipjack Point we looked for and found tiger sharks and rays and of course the skipjacks that swim along with the larger animals. While we were sitting on the bench looking for wildlife we met a couple and we chatted for a while. While we were talking they asked where we were headed next. We said we had a few days to spare between Shark Bay and Ningaloo and they suggested we go to Red Bluff. We put that in our itinerary.

Before getting back to our campsite we called in at the Francois Peron homestead as they had a mineral springs tub. Unfortunately it was closed for cleaning so we missed out on our dip. We ran into our friends from the Kalbarri boat tour who were hoping to do the same. We found out that not everyone enjoyed the lobster tour as much as we did. Some people are just not satisfied!  We drove back into the western sun which was challenging on the sandy road. Whilst driving we saw a couple of emus beside and on the road. We watched the sunset from our campsite.

On our fourth day at Big Lagoon we got up early to drive into Denham for our boat trip. The trip crosses over Shark Bay to Dirk Hartog Island which was where the first European, Dutchman Dirk Hartog landed in 1616. It is just across a small channel from Steep Point. On the way to Dirk Hartog Island we saw several dolphins and a couple of dugongs. We were dropped off on the southern end of the island and we got a photo to commemorate the occasion and walked up a hill to get a bit of a view. The island is  90 kilometres long and mostly sandy soil. Its a quite inhospitable place to live, for humans and animals but incredibly beautiful. We have vowed to go back and camp there at some stage in the future (our next lap perhaps!!). Once back on the boat we traveled to the cliffs of Steep Point and got another commemorative photo. We saw the campground that we had booked and it looked pretty wild and windy with mostly fishermen there. We then went round to Shelter Cove which also had campsites which looked more our speed, so I immediately changed our booking to this one for our Friday night excursion to Steep Point. At Shelter Cove we had two magnificent snorkels. As we were about to jump in the water we saw a tiger shark. No matter apparently, so in we hopped. This snorkel was around a rocky island outcrop over a magnificent purple coral garden. We then moved down the beach a little and snorkeled over cabbage patch coral where we saw 3 sea snakes, multiple stingrays and we swam with a turtle. After lunch on board we motored up the inside coast of Dirk Hartog Island and saw more tiger sharks and some manta rays. We had an onboard photographer so most of the photos are from him, but see if you can guess which are ours.

We had a nice lazy final day in Big Lagoon. We took the kayak across to the other side of the lagoon and walked over the red sandhill past a giant midden to touch the other of Shark Bay. It was quite a paddle back against the strong wind and current but we made it before sunset. We packed up everything we could so we could have an early- ish start the next day.

Our adventure day that I had been fretting over for months had finally arrived. I had watched countless YouTube videos of the road in and it was frequently described as the worst road ever. We are pretty new to 4 wheel driving so that also fed my anxiety. We decided not to take the van and so had to drive first to Hamelin Pool to leave it overnight. The drive to Hamelin Pool was about an hour and a half, according to Google. Of course though there were things to see on the way. First we stopped at Eagle Bluff where a boardwalk is built on the cliff so visitors can see the views and spot animals in the water. Further on we stopped at Shell Beach which is a beach made entirely of shells.

The drop off at Hamelin Pool caravan park was seamless and we were on our way down the “scary road”. The first hundred kms are on a good quality dirt road as it’s managed by the local salt mine at Useless Loop. Then when you reach the National Park sign board there are more warning signs about how to drive it and not to get bogged. The track gets significantly worse and quite corrugated but it wasn’t too bad for the first 10kms. Then at the 39km to go sign there’s very deep sand and a large sandhill to go up on a narrow single track. At the bottom you need to announce that you are about to go up on the CB radio. That’s to warn anyone coming down. Unfortunately our socket for the radio had been damaged and we couldn’t connect. We let the tyres down to 15psi and hoped for the best. Let me tell you that our Prado Altitude is a gem of a car. We made it up the sandhill so easily, to the point that we couldn’t believe that was it! After that the drive traverses the sand dunes, but the road isn’t as deep with sand. It makes for stunning views. There are more corrugations and some salt lakes to drive through plus a few kms driving on the beach. But before we knew it we had arrived at the ranger station. We checked in and the nice young woman gave us lots of good information and we headed to our campsite.

Our campsite was spectacular – literally on the beach with views across to Dirk Hartog Island and right next to the rocky outcrop that we had previously snorkeled around on our boat trip a couple of days before. The set up was quite quick as we had our tent ⛺. We then went for a small snorkel but I got a little freaked out because I remembered that we had seen tiger sharks right here. It was still beautiful. When we came back we got the fishing rods out and guess what – we caught quite a few. The ones I caught were pretty small but Lance caught a couple of decent sized ones, which he threw back. We had planned to eat tuna pasta for dinner if we didn’t catch our dinner. Unfortunately we forgot a can opener so we couldn’t have tuna either so we cooked tomatoes onions and ham and had that with the pasta, which was still very delicious. Sleeping in the tent was a lovely change and we could stare at the stars from bed.

The next morning when I got up and expected to see Lance doing yoga I found him fishing. Even better he had already caught a decent size fish, list an even bigger fish 🐠 and then we caught another fish. We decided to keep these and have them for dinner. We ate our breakfast and packed up and then drove to Steep Point where we took a photo at the sign in the howling wind. We also checked out the campground where we could have been and were doubly glad that we changed. We drove along the cliff line a little and watched the huge waves crashing over the cliffs.

The drive back to Hamelin Pool seemed much quicker and easier but still equally as thrilling. At Hamelin Pool we walked out to see the stromolites which is one of the biggest populations in the world. Unfortunately the boardwalk had been damaged five years ago bu a cyclone and still not fixed so the viewing was from afar. The flies were particularly terrible as well so we didn’t stay long. Back at the caravan park we had a hamburger and a Devonshire tea in the old telegraph station 1880’s and chatted to the owner Trish for quite some time.

We then drove about 100kms to stay at the Wooramel River Retreat which is on the Eastern side of Shark Bay and would be our last stop in this area. Wooramel River Retreat is a sheep station, now tourist resort with hundreds of campsites next to a dried river bed. The river however flows underground and provides thermal springs. The resort has 3 pools where you can relax at any time of the night. We sat under the stars in the pool for quite some time before eating our fish. They were tasty but bony!

Shark Bay delivered more than we could ever have hoped for with amazing scenery, great marine life and wonderful activities. Its a World Heritage Area for many reasons, in fact it ticks every box on the criteria for World Heritage selection. It is one of the few places on Earth to meet all four natural criteria for World Heritage selection. You can’t argue with that!