Along Western Australia’s remote coast, Ningaloo Reef offers a rare experience: a multi-day kayak trip into a world of extraordinary beauty and biodiversity.
Hovering on the surface, peering through my mask, I lock eyes with an ancient reptile. The green sea turtle lifts her head and we’re breathing together, staring; a fleeting moment of curiosity across species. Next, I ogle the stingrays. There’s a carpet of them on the seafloor, buried in the sand with only their bulging eyeballs protruding. My introductory snorkelling session is dazzling – and because this is Ningaloo Reef, it all exists just metres from the beach.
Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, which is many kilometres offshore, Ningaloo Reef, Australia’s other coral masterpiece, sticks to the coast like glue. It’s called a fringing reef, and stretches for 260km along Western Australia’s windswept desert edge, where the coral begins just steps from the sand. Like its larger cousin, Ningaloo is Unesco World Heritage-listed, and like reefs worldwide, it now also faces man-made threats.
Many visitors come to Ningaloo, a distant 1,200km north of Perth, to swim with whale sharks, humpback whales and manta rays. They jump in with the megafauna from specialised tour boats in the deeper waters beyond Ningaloo’s sheltered lagoon, a continuous strip of aqua that extends 500m to 2km off the beach. But I’m choosing something slower and more immersive: to explore the lagoon itself on a multi-day sea kayaking and camping expedition, stopping to snorkel and explore channels that most tourists never see.
The reef’s unusual proximity to land makes this trip possible, and the reef itself is made possible by perfect conditions.
