Ningaloo reef, 1200km later, it was worth the drive
I apologize in advance for any excessive use of adjectives in this post.
After another night at my dump of a campground I got up early (though not before sunrise this time) and got out of there. Heading farther North, through the town of Carnavron, a place to resupply myself with food and fuel. I was originally going to spend a night there to split up the drive to Coral bay, but once I got there and saw the place it seemed very ordinary and it was only midday so I drove the rest of the 300km to Coral bay.
I showed up in Coral bay (which is not actually a town, just a collection of resorts and tourism related industries) around 4pm with no reservation for the night, during the Easter school holiday, which the guidebook tells you explicitly not to do. I got one of the last campsites at one of the caravan parks, lucky me, and this place actually had a usable and semi modern camping kitchen. Microwave soup is fast and easy. The day before I tried a different way for heating soup to good success. You put the can of soup in the back window of the car which is sitting in the sun, it was quite a warm day and after sitting there for a large portion of it the soup was piping hot. I was very happy with the result, but the microwave is much faster.
After that, and a long awaited hot shower, the sunset on the beach was magnificent…
The next morning I got up early, called ahead a hostel bed for my coming days in Exmouth (no more sleeping in the car!) and headed down to the beach to see the reef. I was going to take a kayak/snorkeling trip but there weren’t enough people interested for them to do the morning trip, possibly because it was cloudy, so I rented snorkel gear, got some tips and went to see what I could see close to shore. It’s amazing really, once you leave the shallow area by the beach you only have to swim 5 meters to see some coral and fish. I saw quite a few kinds of fish, many kinds of coral scattered around and several manta rays. Exhilarated by this I took the afternoon kayak trip out onto the reef.
Amazing is how I’ll describe it. I’d never snorkeled before today and I spent about 3-4 hours doing so today with an hour of that being out on the main reef. Here’s the best thing, you kayak for 10 minutes and you’re in the middle of the reef. 10 minutes, that’s how close to shore it is here (it’s even closer to shore farther up North). We kayaked to 2 different snorkeling spots, one to see reef sharks of which we saw 3 kinds, the grey ones being the largest and looking like what you generally imagine a shark to look like. We just saw one of those and he payed no attention to us, an awesome sight for sure.
The second snorkel spot was farther out of the reef and even better than the first, substantially so actually. The number of different kinds of fish in the water is amazing, the big schools of them swimming past you is unbelievable. Saw a few good sized sea turtles too, snorkeling a foot away from a sea turtle is an amazing feeling. The corals here are mostly brown and green, not the brightly coloured stuff popularized by the great barrier reef (which I will hopefully experience in a few weeks), but the coral formations here are awesome and the variety/colouring of fish is incredible. I got back from the kayaking thoroughly exhausted and equally impressed and satisfied, one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
One note, the pictures on here were not taken by me, I’m keeping this non waterproof camera away from saltwater, our guide was shooting throughout and I bought the photo package. Some of the shots aren’t actually of my session, the ‘best of’ shots they have was included with todays and some of the photos from today didn’t turn out well for whatever reason, however everything I have uploaded I saw. Simply stunning, my best experience in Australia so far…. (loads more pics on flickr..)
Tags: Australia, Travel
Adam
Aww, this is my favorite entry of yours yet! I absolutely love the pictures. I caught the set on flickr first and was wondering if you had taken them yourself until I read the blurb about it here. What an awesome experience.
This is awesome! I thought your previous pictures were good. It won’t be easy to top this experience or these pictures!
I *love* snorkeling. I haven’t done it in a very long time (you can’t do it in Miami) but it was a similar experience. Didn’t see any sharks or sea turtles though, but my parents did. I’d love to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef.
I wish I took those pics, lol.
I can’t wait to snorkel the great barrier reef now… You mean we’re not going snorkeling when I’m in Miami??? > : [