My Australia Wish List: Ningaloo Reef

Here is a place I have always wanted to go to in Australia, but never got the chance to is Ningaloo Reef.  However, a lucky writer for Australian Geographic did get a chance to visit the reef and has only further increased my desire to one day visit this scenic area:

The word Ningaloo belongs to the Gnulli people, traditional owners of the coast surrounding the North West Cape of WA. Ningaloo means promontory, but like everything about the stretch of coast between Carnarvon and Exmouth, the name is so much more than it first seems. Just saying Ningaloo conjures images of whale sharks and coral, wilderness and adventure.

magine a promontory shaped like a beckoning finger, nearly 200 km long and jutting into the Indian Ocean. Try to comprehend a landscape that is one of the driest in Australia – with a mere 226mm of rain and an evaporation rate of more than 2.5m annually. Some years, if there isn’t a cyclone, it doesn’t rain at all. On average, the sun shines 320 days out of 365.

Ningaloo is famous not just for its reef, surf breaks and fishing but also its soul-destroying winds, white-hot 45°C temperatures and frontier-like feel. The harshness of the landscape, the swarms of native wasps and bush flies, the fine sand that blows into every nook and cranny, and the burning sun make its gentler moments seem like epiphanies.

Standing sentinel over the northern reef is the Cape Range, a rugged upward fold of limestone packed with fossilised prehistoric marine life including countless perfectly preserved shark teeth that are embedded in the rock and visible to the naked eye.

Inside the boundaries of the surrounding 47,655 ha Cape Range National Park is Mandu Mandu rock shelter, part of a massive system of sinkholes and caves that underpin the peninsula’s weathered spine. Here, archaeologists have confirmed the oldest evidence of the collection and use of fish, shellfish and crabs by indigenous Australians – an astonishing 32,000 years.

Ningaloo Reef itself stretches from the skyscraper-high mili­tary radio antennas, just outside Exmouth, southwards for almost 300km. It’s the nation’s longest fringing coral reef and the name­sake of the 5218 sq.km Ningaloo Marine Park.  [Australian Geographic]

Make sure to read the rest because it is a good read as usual from Australian Geographic.

I actually was very close to Ningaloo when my wife and I visited Shark Bay.  We had the option of either traveling further up the coast of Western Australia to see Ningaloo or head back down south and see the southwestern portion of the state.  We decided to head back south because we figured we had already done a lot of swimming and sailing in the area and wanted to see a different part of the state, which the southwest of the state definitely is with the high peaks of the Stirling Ranges and the region’s thick karri forests.  We had an absolutely fantastic time exploring this area, but we both one day look forward to when we can spend time exploring Ningaloo as well.