A Wild Life

Driving in rural WA is not for the faint-hearted. Four- or five- trailer road trains hurtling towards you, physically blowing your car over to the side of the road, is just the start of it. At least you can see them from a distance on the long, straight roads. The real danger is the wildlife, and I don’t mean drunken hoons weaving around on the road, swigging beer and throwing the bottles out of the window, although they are a danger to every road user. What scares me more are the animals of the bush, as there’s a very good chance you won’t see them coming. Often, they appear out of nowhere, completely oblivious to the danger they’re putting themselves in. You really would have thought that they’d have learned by now – their brothers, sister, mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles and cousins (or parts of them at least) litter the roads throughout Australia. But no, they continue to bound or wander languidly across the road as vehicles come speeding towards them.

We drove the 1000km round trip from Karratha to Exmouth at the weekend for a little jolly on the Ningaloo reef. It was five hours there and another five back but absolutely worth it for the total escape it provided. We spotted an incredible amount of marine life while snorkelling but the journey there and back provided numerous encounters with wildlife on dry land too. We had to brake hard to avoid a kangaroo or two, a cow, a sheep, a couple of wild horses, and three emus who were in no hurry to get anywhere. At the side of the road were the remains of the animals that weren’t quite so lucky and more than a few who had clearly had an intimate encounter with a road train. We never drive at night as the risk of hitting an animal head-on increases manifold. Kangaroos are especially active between dusk and dawn and tend to freeze when they see the lights of your car rather than do the sensible thing and hurry along. Cows use the warm road to bunk down for a night’s kip. As we don’t have a bull bar fitted to the front of our car we run the risk not only of obliterating a roo, cow, sheep, giant goanna, emu, or other wild creature, but ourselves too. Not many survive a kick in the head from a flying roo. I felt safer in the water on the Ningaloo reef, amongst the sting rays, sharks, puffer fish and other nasties than I did on the road in the car.

Ah, the Ningaloo reef. Is there a finer place in this world? Talcum powder beaches, turquoise water, an aquarium’s worth of marine life just waiting to be discovered by you. We spent a glorious weekend going from sea to beach, beach to sea, back to the beach… you get the picture. Snorkelling on the Ningaloo reef is like immersing yourself in the biggest and best aquarium in the world, and the greatest thing about it is that, unlike the heavily touristed Great Barrier Reef, you won’t be surrounded by hordes of others. It feels like you’re discovering your own personal underwater world. In amongst the brightly coloured, incredibly shaped coral, swim luminous parrot fish, striped angel fish, giant fish of every colour, black-tipped reef sharks, shy octopuses, gentle turtles, spotted rays… I could go on and on. The only sounds you hear underwater are those of the fish chowing down on the coral. It’s another world and it’s a world I could be quite happy to explore for days on end.

Both on land and in the water, it’s a wild life in WA.