We’ve got the pack up of the caravan down to a science and were able to ship out of our caravan park with time to grab some fuel and a cuppa before our ‘canoe safari’. The organizers took us and a half dozen other couples up a 4WD track to a junction of the Murchison River, handed us a canoe and said have at’er. Being proudly Canadian we demonstrated our superior paddling skills while the Poms and some keen Aussies decided to make the short paddle a marathon by zig zagging up the river. There were fortunately no flipped canoes or heart attacks – although a breaky of eggs, bacon and white toasted bread may have increased the chances on the latter part of the journey. It was great to get back on the water with a paddle and we hadn’t lost too much of our skills navigating the shallows and avoiding the dead-heads. We were back by noon and started our trek to Monkey Mia some 400 kms up the road. Despite a fuel stop and some arguments about the potential natural intrigue of cyanobacteria and stromalites (a possible point of interest along the route) we forged ahead and made the ‘Mia’ just before sunset. The entry appears quite sophisticated – large sandstone gates with Monkey Mia carved in the stone so we felt like we were entering some posh resort. Appearances can be deceiving though and once through the gates a world of fishing boats, wall to wall caravans and tents filled our vista. It was so packed in stretches we weren’t sure how we would navigate around the industrial hardware. Again, fortune was on our side and our site was almost on the beach with unfettered views of the ocean. We’d booked two sites for ourselves and the in-laws but once on the site found one site large enough to accommodate us both so with the refund had some extra meal/beer money for future festivities. There is a different sense of place here – on the one hand you have the sort of industrial/keen fishing side which predominantly inhabits the caravan park and on the other, your cosmopolitan backpacker crowd from Europe and surrounds that seem keen to catch up on sun cancer on the beach. Everyone is pleasant and the scenery adds a calming, tropical dimension to the general feel. It’s funny how a turquoise tinge to the water makes you feel at ease – must be all those advertisements for vacation escapes that have become imprinted on our subconsciousness. Thing about Monkey Mia is that it essentially sits at the end of a barren empty peninsula seemingly where the desert seems to meet the sea. The name is an English-Aboriginal conjunction. The Monkey moniker refers to a possible 3 historically relevant associations – one of the first boats to moor here and stay for sometime was named the ‘Monkey’, the early Malay pearl divers had monkeys for pets and finally, a colloquialism for goats and sheep which were previously farmed here is ‘Monkey’. Mia is the local aboriginal word for ‘home’. It reminds me of Uluru in that it is a bloody long way from anywhere and one of its sole purposes is simply tourism. Despite its distance from relative civilization it is a beautiful place and in contrast to the perception of some previous Wicked Campervan visitors who had allocated it as ‘Crap’ on the Wicked Depot map of WA, is far from it and well worth the visit.
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