Flipper Commeth

Flipper
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Well.  We woke up after the hectic night in Margaret River and headed north yet again.  This time our goal was to stop and stay in a Bunbury.  Bunbury has the dolphins and well.. Krystal is now obsessed with the swimming mammals.  So we drove north all the way to Bunbury only to find out that the hostels were all booked up.   You would think that we would call ahead.. well.. we didn't.  This meant we had to drive back south to a town called Dunsborough to spend the night.  Before leaving Bunbury we did a quick tour around the town and took some pics from the ugliest lookout ever. Krystal dubbed it the space needle.  We learned from the dolphin conservation center that the animals usually show up in the morning.. so our plan was to return tomorrow bright and early the next day.

Pic from the Boat
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Dunsborough is a pretty sleepy place with not much to do.  Our room was a white room with absolutely nothing in it but a bed on concrete floors.  It was like sleeping in a prison.  We ate and read our books and hit the hay.

Early the next morning we woke up, checked out and headed to Dolphin city, err, I mean Bunbury.  It took a little over an hour to get to the Dolphin conservation center.  The animals are all completely wild.  Some days they swim up to the shore and this center is located at a spot they usually turn up.  No dolphin had been there for a few days.  There are people sitting on the beach.. waiting..  The volunteer staff attempt to keep everyone entertained as we wait.  Krystal and I were not sure what to do.. so to up our changes of seeing a dolphin we booked a boat tour and left the conservation area.  As we pulled up to the boat we could see the beach off in the distance that everyone in the conservation center had waded into the water.. NOOOOOOOOOOO.. we were missing it.  Krystal drove like a maniac back to the center.. we ran.. (myself slowly trying to look cool) and found 2 mom dolphins with 2 babies.  They allowed everyone to wade up to our waists.  The dolphins swim around within centimeters of everyone.  They are just as curious as we are.  It was amazing.  I took approximately 1,200,345.1 pictures.  We stayed for roughly 20mins until the dolphins left then made a panicked attempt to make it back to the boat in time.  The boat had been forced to wait for a tour to show up as well.. so we were lucky and made it aboard.  The boat was just as amazing.  It took us out in the bay where we saw dolphins everywhere.  They even swam ahead of the boat as we patrolled around just like in the baywatch commercials.  Unreal.  After an hour and half we headed back into shore.  Krystal was over stimulated and couldn't stop cooing about her new dolphin friends.

Mandurah
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We started to make our way back to Liz's house in Perth.  It was a few hour drive so we decided to stop and take a swim in Mandurah.  It is just south of Perth and has ridiculously huge houses.  They have even dregged a lot of the area so that everyone can park their yachts next to their houses.  We swam at an amazing beach and were the only ones around... and guess who showed up?  More dolphins!  They played in the water and one came within 15 meters of us.  We told everyone we met and no Australian seems to care about seeing them.. but it was still pretty cool.

We eventually made it up to Perth were Liz and David treated us again, this time to diner out with Jono, Ellen, Carolyn (Daughter #2) and her parter Tim.

All around the west coast was amazing and treated us well.