Alex Hutchinson for The New York Times
The Peron Peninsula in Western Australia. More Photos »
After a hair-raising, tire-spinning, engine-overheating, two-and-a-half-hour drive through soft, shifting sand in temperatures well over 100 degrees, we reached the end of a thin peninsula jutting into the ocean's void. There, near the westernmost point in Australia, a tableau more stunning than the heat stretched out below us.
On either side, the coastline fell away in tricolor stripes: azure sky, red dune cliffs, blindingly white beach. The water was perfectly transparent, and from a cliff-edge platform we peered down into another world, a child's primer of aquatic life in the Indian Ocean. A pod of dolphins frolicked; huge manta rays cruised below the surface like undulating black shadows; dugongs and sea turtles drifted; right below us, a cowtail stingray skimmed along; and everywhere you looked, patrolling the shoreline and lurking behind rocks, were sharks, sharks and more sharks.
I was halfway through an 11-day road trip up Australia's unsung west coast, with my wife, Lauren, and her parents, Frank and Anda. We'd flown to Perth, the only major city on that side of the continent, and rented an all-wheel-drive (remember that detail) RAV4 for the trip. Our goal: Ningaloo Reef — the "other" great reef, a 160-mile-long stretch that hugs the coast starting about 700 miles north of Perth.
The reef that Ningaloo is "other" to is, of course, the Great Barrier Reef, on Australia's more developed east coast. Two years ago, Lauren and I had visited the Great Barrier Reef and left with mixed feelings. It is undoubtedly impressive — it's the world's largest living structure — and attracts two million tourists a year. But as a result, long stretches of the coast are now crowded and overdeveloped, and the reef's best spots are an exhausting and (for me) stomach-turning two-hour boat ride from shore. Ningaloo promised the opposite: an empty coast and a teeming reef, with all the weird and wildly colored tropical sea creatures you could shake a snorkel at — all within wading distance of your hotel's beach.
Adding to the appeal of the trip was the journey to get there, which had all the makings of an epic and quintessentially Aussie road trip. (Indeed, if we just wanted to snorkel, we could have taken one of the daily flights from Perth to the small airstrip in Exmouth, near the heart of the reef.) Within hours of leaving Perth, we were barreling along a straight, smooth highway, red desert to our right and coastline to our left, tweaking the steering wheel only to avoid the occasional flattened kangaroo.
We soon realized that the northern part of the coast was much emptier than we'd expected; between the isolated dots on the map where we'd booked accommodations, there was almost nothing. And since it was December, the height of the austral summer, temperatures soared. Whenever the road veered inland, the reading on the car's thermometer would climb above 100 and occasionally 110 degrees; when it dropped back to the coast, it would plummet by 20 or 30 degrees.
In a series of near-empty national parks, we hiked along coastal cliffs and marveled at peculiar rock formations and deep river canyons cutting through the parched desert. Then, three days into the trip, we reached the edges of Shark Bay, named in 1699 by the British privateer William Dampier. "Of the sharks we caught a great many," he noted in his journal, "which our men eat very savourily." (He also reported catching an 11-foot-long shark whose stomach contained "the head and bones of a hippopotamus" — probably a dugong, a lumbering manatee-like mammal that is gravely endangered worldwide but still thrives there.)
Our first stop in Shark Bay, now a Unesco World Heritage site, was Shell Beach, whose high-wattage white "sand" is actually a 30-foot-thick layer of crushed cockle shells. We tried to be impressed by the stromatolites, rocky-looking lumps in the bay's hyper-salty shallows that are actually examples of one of the oldest life-forms on earth — bacterial organisms that, billions of years ago, generated the oxygen that allowed complex life to emerge. (The ones in Shark Bay are estimated to be "only" a few thousand years old.) The whale sharks, at up to 60 feet long the world's largest fish species, migrate along this stretch of coast between March and July. But Shark Bay's most reliable year-round tourist attraction was ready to greet us on cue the morning after we arrived. With several hundred other tourists, we gathered on the beach at Monkey Mia to hear a talk from a ranger while a dozen wild dolphins frolicked impatiently behind her. They swam up one at a time to take a fish from a volunteer just a few feet in front of us; the other dolphins lolled in the shallows and peered back at us with one eye out of the water.
Later that morning, we took a catamaran tour of the bay, tacking back and forth amid dugongs, brightly colored sea snakes, a loggerhead turtle and a tiger shark. At one point, we looked down through the netting between the two hulls and saw dolphins speeding along with us, leaping and playing on the breaking edge of our wake.
Monkey Mia, by far the most popular tourist spot in Shark Bay, is halfway up the Peron Peninsula, which shelters the inner waters of the bay. The upper half of the peninsula is protected as François Peron National Park, accessible via a treacherous 30-mile soft-sand track that snakes through barren scrubland to a lookout at the tip — suitable only for "high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicles," the signs warned. This prompted much fruitless scanning of our car's manual for definitions of "all-wheel" versus "four-wheel" drive and the precise dimensions of "high-clearance." We tried instead to book spots on a 4x4 tour run by Monkey Mia Wildsights, a local outfitter, but it was full. The tour leader did promise that as long as we left before her and stayed ahead, she'd stop and pull us out if needed. "No worries," she insisted, looking over our vehicle. "She'll be right."
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