Coral Bay/Ningaloo Reef

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(There are very few pictures with this blog as we dont have an underwater camera. We have just a couple that one of the other guys on the Manta ray swimming trip took and copied across for us)

The flight from Perth to Learmouth, the closest airport to Ningaloo is about 2 hrs. We wanted to go to the Ningaloo reef because it is fringing the coast, unlike the Great Brrier Reef which is quite far out from the shore. We could see from the plane that there is a sandy coast stretching all the way up from Perth along the west coast. There are very few towns and villages....less and less the further north you go. From Learmouth we took a prebooked shuttle to Coral Bay. The shuttle took one and a half hours of driving through deserty scrub punctuated by gigantic termite mounds. Coral Bay is a smal place with 2 caravan parks, a backpackers , a resort and a couple of shops and cafes; like an oasis in the middle of this desert. The shuttle was pretty expensive, so we put up a sign as soon as we arrived at the backpackers asking if anyone would give us a lift to the airport on Friday for payment......and somebody immediately promised that he would....

There is a lovely beach with white sands and turqoise sea. It was really quite windy when we arrived, so did not seem very hot. The backpackers had a swimming pool which tasted a bit salty. There was a tap for drinking water. The water coming from the other taps also tasted a bit salty. I asked someone if it was sea water, and she explained that the water comes fom a borehole going deep underground, and this is why it is salty. She also said that it comes out of the ground hot, and has to be cooled before use. (Richard later confirmed that this is the case with the water in a lot of mining settlements in WA).

Our first 2 days we went to the beach and snorkeled from there. Then we went for a swim in the pool and stayed indoors in the early afternoons. The corals on the Ningaloo reef were different from the ones that we had seen in Raratonga. In Raratonga they were like colourful brains. In Ningaloo there were brownish corals looking like califlowers or roses, and there were ones like stags antlers with coloured tips on the ends. There were many similar fish to those in Raratoga, but not quite so many. The water was colder and deeper. We were fortunate that we didnt come across any sharks.

At low tide there were rays swimming in the shallows. We could get really close up to them, and then they would flap about burying themselves in the sand.

On the Thursday we took an organised nature cruise. This was an all day boat ride which took you out further into the deeper parts of the reef to snorkel, took you to see turtles, and took you to swim with giant manta rays. (if we had been there a month before we could have swum with migrating whales). This was great. There were great deep cliffs of coral of all diferent sorts. The turtles looked really sweet bobbing up and down in the water, and the highlight was the Manta rays. The manta rays are massive fish about 10 feet across. They are not dangerous. They just swim along over the sand with their mouth open feeding on plankton. They look incredibly graceful as they swoosh along with a slow stately flap of their fins as if flying.

Then Friday it was time to take our arranged lift back to the airport. We checked again with the guy, and he said he was not going to take us after all. Bit tricky, as the shuttle has to be arranged at least the day before. We asked around, and it seemed there was no available transport. So we set off in very good time for the flight to hitch hike. It could have been really horrible sitting in the heat beside that road....but we were lucky! The second vehicle was a camper van. They stopped and took us all the wayto the airport. There, we sat in the air conditioning for a few hours waiting and reading books, since we were ridiculously early.

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