STILL on our tour of Western Australia’s south-west corner, we headed south from Fremantle towards Busselton – our next stop for a couple of nights.
The seaside town is visited by loads of tourists every year as it is laid-back, friendly – and has a really, really long jetty.
In fact, the wooden jetty is the longest in the southern hemisphere, and would be the longest in the world if it wasn’t for pesky Southend-on-Sea in England.
It is more than 1.8km long (over a mile for you non-metric types) and is usually serviced by a train.
Those who make the journey out along the jetty can visit an underwater observatory which sinks down 13 metres to the sea floor.
We were booked into a guided tour of the observatory, and as we had got up late, ended up running half the length of the jetty to catch the start of the tour. Doh!
But we made it, and were soon hearing about how the acrylic-windowed tube was floated around from where it was built before being sunk into the ocean.
The views of the coral on the piles of the jetty were great, and schools of fish lazily swam past the windows.
There was also a black-spotted wrasse who was known for hanging around outside the window, presumably checking out the weird creatures inside.
He was called Bob.
Bob swam up and down the glass, marvelling at the strange creatures chittering away inside and holding black and silver boxes which flashed every now and then.
Sadly for Bob, we soon had to go. But we had a lot of photos.
We also enjoyed Busselton’s drive-in movie theatre one evening. The sound was not only broadcast on little speakers by the side of each car, but was available by tuning your radio into a certain frequency.
The strange part came when we left with the radio still on, meaning we were still listening to the exit music about a mile down the road.
The next day we headed to Bunbury, a slightly more built-up town which was home to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.
We were booked in for a dolphin swim, which meant donning thick wetsuits and going out with a few researchers to hopefully encounter wild dolphins.
The water was a chilly 19 degrees and, sadly for us, very murky.
There had been a storm a few days before which meant you couldn’t see very far underwater.
This was a blow as the wild dolphins were known to swim underneath and through the groups of swimmers.
We got masks and snorkels on, and waiting for a suitable time to get in the water.
When a group of dolphins was spotted, we carefully slid into the water and bobbed up and down, making noises and swimming about, waiting for them to find us interesting.
A couple of dolphins did eventually come our way, and actually swam through the group between a couple people.
But about the best view we had was of their fins poking out of the water as they came through, before disappearing back down beneath.
The water was so murky that we couldn’t see them when they were under – they could have swum right past me for all I knew.
Back on board, the boat turned around and we saw a couple of dolphins ‘surfing’ on the mid-sized waves heading into shore, jumping out of the water as they went.
With the group out of the water, a few dolphins came right up to the sides to swim alongside the boat – but it was too late to jump in with them.
We did get to meet a lovely couple from Newcastle called Norman and Flo, and shared a few travelling stories with them.
Norman had brought some pork pies with him for his lunch, and gave one of them to Andy, who enjoyed it very much.
The boat soon reached the sandy shore and we hopped off to warm up with a cup of tea.
It certainly wasn’t a cold day, but the chilly water took a while to shake off.
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