This week’s travel dream: Exploring Australia’s other great reef

There comes a moment in any great adventure when you ask yourself why you came, said Alex Hutchinson in The New York Times. During an 11-day road trip up Australia’s sparsely populated west coast, mine arrived when my wife and I took an undersized Toyota onto a soft-sand trail and almost burned out the engine under a punishing sun. “But then we stepped out of the car,” walked over red sand to the edge of a cliff, and looked out on “a tableau more stunning than the heat.” We stood under an azure sky at the tip of a peninsula, close to the continent’s westernmost point, peering down into “another world.” Just off the white-sand beach swam manta rays and sea turtles, dolphins and shark after shark—“a child’s primer of aquatic life in the Indian Ocean.”

Why had we come? Our ultimate destination lay days ahead, a natural wonder known as Australia’s “other” great reef. But my wife, her parents, and I felt more than game to add on “an epic and quintessentially Aussie road trip,” so all 700 miles from Perth to the Ningaloo Reef counted. Just hours into the drive, it was obvious we wouldn’t be battling the crowds that teem along the east coast and its legendary Great Barrier Reef. “Between the isolated dots on the map where we’d booked accommodations, there was almost nothing.” Well, nothing except “a series of near-empty national parks” where we “marveled at peculiar rock formations and deep river canyons cutting through the parched desert.”

Ningaloo Reef didn’t disappoint. Unlike its more famous east coast sister, this 160-mile-long reef practically hugs the shore. One morning after reaching Coral Bay, I walked out of my hotel with snorkel and flippers in hand and waded into the bath-warm water. “As giant mahimahi drifted past without a glance in my direction, I soon had the sense that I was invisible.” Lifting my head above the surface some time later, I realized that the only sign of civilization I could see was our hotel in the distance. “At that moment, there was no doubt in my mind which reef is greater.”

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Doubles at the Ningaloo Reef Resort (coralbay.org) start at $213.