Australia’s other coral wonder

A ribbon of life in Australia’s remote west, Ningaloo Reef is where desert meets sea and ocean giants come to feed, a glorious, sparkling, thriving contrast to the adjoining dry, dusty landscape.

As well as providing some of the most extraordinary marine wildlife experiences available anywhere in the world, the great news is it’s relatively easy and cheap to access Ningaloo’s waters – once you get there.

Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, which is a complex maze of more than 2900 individual coral reefs spread across a wide continental shelf, Ningaloo is a single uninterrupted reef stretching for 300km from Exmouth Gulf in the north to Red Bluff, near Carnarvon, in the south. One of the world’s longest fringing reefs, it is protected by the 2900sq.km Ningaloo Marine Park, which was declared in 1987.

Thanks to an absence of significant human pressures, the reef and surrounding waters are home to countless animals and plants. In 2011 its protection was