After the road trip on the West coast, I met up with Eva, Valentijn (?) and Niels to travel the obligatory Great Ocean Road. A few days in Melbourne and I found myself already on the way back to Canberra, not without climbing the highest (!) mountain of Australia. Well, ok it’s only something like 2300m, but hey, it was a really nice hike!

As the Whale Shark tour was planned as one of the highlights of our trip to the West coast, we couldn’t refuse to get onto the two last spots – even though slipping through the credit card resulted in almost physical pain! I won’t post how much they charged us…

However, I have to admit, it was quite well spent money! In the morning we got on the boat and went through the procedure to interact with the Whale Sharks. The idea is that, as soon as the spotter plane located one of those giant fish, the boat would rush to that location and drop off a group of 10 in front of it. Getting closer to the animal, the group is meant to split to either side and swim for a little while with it (they are quite fast, you can’t really keep up for long). We were not allowed to dive underneath it or come closer than 5m or so. So much for the theory!

In reality the ocean was so rough that the majority of the group, including me, spent most of the cruise alongside the railings, feeding the fish. When we arrived, everything had to happen quite quickly in order not to miss the whale. Therefore we  jumped more or less randomly into the water, tried to find the guide who was pointing towards the whale, and followed him. The water was quite turbid, so one could literary not see the whale until it was JUST in front of you – quite a bummer when a mouth, easily the size of your entire body, is approaching  at a decent speed! So you tried to get out of its way and swim to the sides. After 20secs or so the chaps disappeared in front of us, so we were all collected by the boat (btw., also quite a task to get onto a boat swaying ~3m up and down) and the whole procedure started over again.

After a few rounds only few people were actually still interested to go another time – most of them were occupied keeping the fish fed – so I could manage to swim with the whales for quite a few times (5ish, counting was definitely over my capabilities at that point, I was basically trying to not through up into my snorkel :-D). It was quite a rough trip but the experience made up for it, that’s for sure! Those seconds watching this huge animal foraging its way through the water seemingly completely effortless – it’s a memory which won’t fade away soonish.

PS: we were lucky, we got to see the largest Whale Shark of the season, about 8m
PPS: the pics are made by a photographer and some of them are not from our tour – but I’ve seen all of it with my own eyes!

After a smooth flight through several timezones (and daylight saving participators – that’s timezone calculation for the advanced) I arrived in Perth and picked up our cute little Hippie Camper and Katja and headed North. Soonish the car was officially declared a she and named ‘Emma’ – so a road trip with two girls it is; tempting, yet risky ;-).

The first few days were already quite promising and full of adventures of the smaller and the bigger kind. Worth mentioning might be the first snorkeling experience: arriving at the snorkel spot we found a sign stating ‘white shark seen 21.3.’, which was already a week ago. Changing to swim shorts, a group of seriously concerned looking young guys jumped out of their jeep, armed with a big permanent marker, adding ‘Great’ to the ‘white shark’ and replacing the date with that day’s. Comment of the guys: ‘Seriously, don’t go out there! – Ah, ok just snorkeling in the pools here, yeeeaaahh that’s fine!’. Well, I spotted just one tiny fish but the experience was nevertheless quite thrilling :-D.

A highlight was certainly the quad bike tour in the dunes of Kalbarri (guide: ‘DON’T jump over the dunes again!’) and the feeding of the ‘wild’ dolphins at Monkey Mia beach; touristic but still a really nice experience!

Right now we are heading towards Coral Bay and the Ningaloo Reef and hopefully we manage to have a first dive this afternoon! These days, as the semi-highlight of this tour, we want to join a Shark Whale watching tour, where you can actually swim and interact with the biggest fish on earth! My personal highlight will be a dive at one of the top-10 dive sites world wide, the Navy Pier in Exmouth. So stay tuned for some more news from OZ!

To avoid that people unconsciously assume I’d just have fun here in Australia, some serious pics to proof the opposite!

Just some pics from various days here in and around Canberra!