Monkey Mia, on the northwest coast of Western Australia. Wild dolphins have been coming into the shallows here for years hoping to interact with humans. Okay, it's all about the big buckets of fish on offer every morning. We had no concept of eco-tourism back then.
This place is about as far as you can fly from Sydney and still be in Australia. It's also the only place in Western Australia where you can watch the sunrise over water (as Western Australia faces the Indian Ocean to the west they get the sunsets but not the sunrises. Monkey Mia is positioned at the head of a peninsula, which is how this becomes possible).
We travelled up the west coast on an overnight Greyhound Pioneer bus from Perth. The road was straight and narrow and the scenery barely changed in 600 miles. The bus stopped to refuel at a roadhouse (service station) called "Billabong" which made me smile for hours afterwards. The roadhouse was run by a big old bloke wearing a string vest with egg stains down the front. He fried up some bacon for the bus driver while we scrapped over stale muffins front of house.
The dolphins arrived at 7am, right on cue. We drank orange juice on a catamaran afterwards before making our weary way back down the coast.
I wish we'd gone to Ningaloo Reef instead, but hindsight is a great thing.
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