Why Western Australia Is the Continent’s Best Kept Secret – Town & Country

I was first seduced by the dramatic landscapes of Western Australia (often called "the real Australia" by Aussies) as I watched Baz Lurhmanns epic 2008 Antipodean western, Australia, which was largely shot there. A tale of love, war, and the plight of Australia's Stolen Generations (Indigenous and mixed-race children who were forcibly removed from their families by the government, supposedly for their own good), it stars Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, and a mesmerizing Brandon Walters as an Aboriginal Australian child of dual provenance ("I not a black fella; I not a white fella either"), and it has just been released as an expanded six-part series on Hulu and retitled Faraway Downs. Luhrmann has recentered and recontextualized the film: It is now expressed from the perspective of the Aboriginal boy.

Coincidentally, likewise in 2008, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal Australians (especially the Stolen Generations) for the centuries-long, near genocidal depredations they endured. It was the culmination of a national project of reconciliation, begun a decade and a half earlier, to reintegrate Indigenous Australian people and culture into the country's history and economic life.

Nowadays, as a visitor to Australia, you will come across a number of Indigenous Australian guides, indigenous place names attached to English ones (Perth is Boorloo in the Nyungar language), and "acknowledgement of country" rituals at many gatherings, including on planes before landing and at lodges before dinner service, when some version of the following is intoned: "We acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and pay our respects to elders past and present."

The Bungle Bungles, in Purnululu National Park, are one of the highlights of the Kimberley region.

In Faraway Downs, Kidman plays an aristocratic Englishwoman who arrives in the outback, as World War II is about to break out, to claim a million-acre cattle ranch (which she inherits after her husband dies) and to sell it off. Or so she thinks before she falls in love with the country, a man, and a child. "When [she] came to this land," the child, Nullah, says of the Kidman character in a pivotal early scene shot in Western Australia's Bungle Bungles, an otherworldly area of 360-million-year-old sandstone eroded into giant striped, beehive-like formations, "she look but she not see. Now she got her eyes open for the first time." He may be talking about the effect on her of this fantastical geology, but it's more than that. She is also beginning to appreciate the complexities of this ancient land and of a people struggling mightily for redemption.

I embarked on my trip to Western Australia almost on a dare. "Nobody goes there," I was told. "It's too far." Americans mostly focus on Australia's developed east and southeast: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Queensland's so-called Gold Coast, and the Great Barrier Reef. For Australians, 80 percent of whom live along the east coast, the flight to Perth takes almost as long as one to Bali or the South Pacific.

A HeliSpirit chopper in the Kimberley, a good way to get around. They are often operated without doors "so you can see better," as a pilot told me. Wheee!

Distances between settled places in Western Australia are often so great (the state is 3.7 times the size of Texas) that unless you're prepared to spend days driving (from Perth to the Bungle Bungles, for example, takes 33 hours), exploring WA, as Aussies refer to Western Australia, requires some combination of commercial flights, small chartered planes, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and helicoptersbut it's worth the logistical effort both for the experience of WA's singular, off-the-beaten-path natural wonders and for the places you'll get to stay. Several of WA's lodges belong to an exclusive 20-member club, the

Below is the itinerary of my two-week journey of discovery last August, in map and textfrom Perth northeast to the wilds of the Kimberley region (home of the Bungle Bungles and El Questro), south to the Margaret River wine region, and then northwest to Ningaloo Reef, the west coast's answer to the Great Barrier Reef, where I hoped (major wish list item) to swim with whale sharks and perhaps humpback whales. The itinerary was developed with Sydney-based travel advisor Stuart Rigg of Southern Crossings, my go-to man for travel Down Under.

My magical mystery tour of Western Australia in a nutshell. Read on.

My trio of Perth hotels. From left: Comos the Treasury; Crown Towers Perth; and Ritz-Carlton Perth.

Perth is by far WA's largest city and the state's gateway. Your international flight will land here (I flew New YorkDohaPerth), as will most flights from Australia's east coast. It is also the departure point for destinations in WA's north and south; I would end up coming through on three separate occasions.

Como the Treasury occupies a decorative mid-19th-century colonial government building in a historic, recently revitalized part of downtown, and its serene interiors were designed (listen up, Aman junkies) by Kerry Hill, the founding architect of Aman resorts. Not much remains of old Perth, so if you like a whiff of history, this is the place. The Ritz-Carlton Perth has huge, wood-accented rooms with panoramic views of Elizabeth Quay and a buzzy restaurant, Hearth. The views from my room at the resort-like Crown Towers Perth, overlooking Swan River, made me gasp when I walked inspring for a high floor. There is a large lagoon-pool complex with private cabanas near the river, and multiple restaurants and boutiques.

Kings Park in Perth is a nice place to wander about and get acquainted with Western Australian flora.

My stops here were short but revelatory. The Aboriginal Australian guide, Justin Martin (@DjurandiDreaming), who took me on a foray into Kings Park and its botanic gardenone of the largest inner city parks in the world, harboring 3,000 species of WA's native florawas at first keen to talk plants but soon moved on to the history of his people, the Wadjuk Nyungar, whose traditional lands stretch over the Perth metropolitan area. The 200 years after colonial settlement began in Australia (in 1788 on the east coast, 1829 here) were not pretty, and he reminds me of the facts in broad strokes: the declaration by the British government of the continent being a Terra Nullis, "land belonging to no one" (i.e., uninhabited, to justify colonization); the attacks by white settlers on Indigenous Australians, from the late 18th until the early 20th centuries, with more than 400 recorded massacres; the tragedy of the Stolen Generations, which unfolded from 1905 until 1969 (and some say continued into the 1970s); and right here in Perth, the "Native Pass" system, which between 1927 and 1954 prohibited Aboriginal Australians from entering the center of the city without a permit.

At the WA Museum Boola Bardip (note the Indigenous name) I found myself contemplating, in a display of 32,000-year-old shell beads, the Aboriginal people's more distant past. Discovered in a cave near Mandu Mandu Creek, on WA's northwest Indian Ocean coast, they are among the world's oldest extant jewelry, each bead bearing a faintly visible groove on each end, probably made by a long-vanished twine on which they might once have been strung into a necklace. As remarkable as their ageand as yet further proof of the primal human desire for physical adornmentis the fact that the story of Aboriginal Australians is older still. They arrived by sea from southeast Asia in a single migration around 60,000 years ago, ultimately forming as many as 250 language-based groups, of which 123 are still in use today (they are as different from one another as French and English). The Aboriginal groups are connected to stretches of territory known as "country," which Indigenous Australians view in both physical and spiritual terms. Collectively, "country" comprises the oldest continuous culture in the world.

I had time for dinner only once in the hip greater Perth neighborhood of Fremantle (frequently abbreviated to Freo, but Walyalup in Nyungar), but I would have liked to spend a day. The original British port in Western Australia, first settled by whites in 1829, it has well-preserved examples of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, traces of Australia's past as a British penal colony, and a thriving arts and culinary scene. The many black swans in Perth were altogether a revelation: They appear not only in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake but all along Perth's Swan River.

You can go alone into the gorges and chasms of the Bungle Bungles, but I strongly recommend a guide. As the child in Faraway Downs says, "There are spirits here."

It's home of the aforementioned Bungle Bungles, the extraordinary, UNESCO World Heritagelisted sandstone massif carved over million of years into weird domes, pinnacles, and wavy walls, riven by gorges and chasms and striped orange and dark gray (layers of sediment rich in iron are orange, those rich in clay, home to cyanobacteria, are dark gray or green). It was "unknown" until 1983 (except, of course, to the indigenous Gija people, who have inhabited the area, and walked through here, for at least 20,000 years). But that's the Kimberley for youWestern Australia's northernmost region and also its wildest, most remote, and least traversable. And coincidentally, or perhaps not, where Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first come ashore. Slightly smaller than the entire state of California, it consists of steep-sided mountain ranges and plateaux from which extreme monsoon rains (November to April) and harsh winds have removed much of the fertile soil. Rivers flood regularly; roads, many of them corrugated, wash away; and nature rules. Which is also the source of its attraction.

Via a three-hour commercial flight from Perth to the town of Kununurra, gateway to the eastern Kimberley, followed by a six-seater Airvan (there's an 8 kg luggage limit) to Purnululu Park's tiny Bellburn airstrip. The pilot shouted over the roar of the engine as we flew over Lake Argyle, the largest man-made lake in the world; the recently shuttered Argyle diamond mine, which until 2020 produced 90 percent of the world's pink diamonds; and cattle stations (Lissadell, Texas Downs), their homesteads just tiny specks in the vast, hilly, ochre-colored emptiness.

The platform tents of the APT Bungle Bungle Wilderness Lodge may look modest, but its sheer luxury just to be here.

The solar-powered APT Bungle Bungle Wilderness Lodge is not luxe in a traditional way, but its 29 tents are well spaced for privacy, with their own decks, comfortable beds, and strong, hot showers, and there's an inviting central communal space where meals and drinks are served. The meals are long-table affairs, and on my first night the open kitchen produced, in this middle of proverbial nowhere, pumpkin soup, charred prawns with salsa fresca, and a dark chocolate mousse. I walked back to my tent in environmentally correct low-voltage-lit darkness, amid a cacophony of cicadas, looking up at the Milky Way and stomping as hard as I could on the sandy path. Why? Because, as one of my Australian dinner companions noted nonchalantly, "snakes in Australia are poisonous. But they will try to keep awaythey can pick up our vibrations on the ground."

Bec Sampi, my guide in the Bungle Bungles. "I dont guide here at night, but i do come out with the grandchildren. its magic."

What one does in the Bungle Bungles is hike: out of the baking daytime sun into cool, shady, often palm-fringed gorges hidden among the strange domes. My guide from Kingfisher Tours, Bec Sampi, is a speaker of the local Gija and Jaru languages and is a Gija "custodian of country," a traditional honorific bestowed on those who have long lived on a piece of land and walked through it, appreciate it, take care of it.

Cathedral Gorge in the Bungle Bungles. Matters sacred to Indigenous culture take place here when no one else is about.

In the aptly named Cathedral Gorge, an immense circular cavern about two kilometers roundtrip from the southern edge of the Bungles, Bec breaks into a Gija "Welcome to Country" song: an Indigenous ceremony in which local elders have for millennia welcomed people from other areas to their territory. Her words, unintelligible to me, echo hauntingly in the vast space, which vibrates with the sound. There are a few white Australians in the Cathedral, and they come up to thank her; one woman is crying. It does feel like a giftand a form of time travel, something incomprehensibly ancient brought to new life.

I'd read before my trip that Australian Indigenous culture is famously impenetrable to outsiders. The majority of sacred sites and rock artworks are off-limits to visitors; myths and stories, considered powerful and private, cannot be shared. Bec tells me that "men's celebrations" take place in the Cathedral in December, but when I ask her for details she recoils. "That's taboo. I can't speak about that." Yet on our way out she leads me under a rocky overhang and points to two small, faint paintings of boomerangs. "They are thousands of years old. They mean 'no trespassing.' If you saw this, you'd have to declare who you are and what you want here."

Who I am and what am I doing here is a powerfully existential question I feel even less able to answer at our next stop, Echidna Chasm, on the north side of the park. In contrast to the Cathedral, it is dramatically narrow and high-walled, the sky a shard of blue far, far above our heads. The path in and out is a mess of loose stones and boulders, each step a balancing act. I feel as small as an ant, and as squishable. A tad unnerved (a touch of claustrophobia plus an incipient worry about snakes), I'm chatting (a bit manically, I'm sure) as we make our way out. "Non-Indigenous people are loud," Bec observes, kindly but pointedly. "They find it very hard to be quiet. It takes them a long time to just sit and listen." Indeed.

An hour before sunset she takes us to what she calls her favorite sundowner spot and sets up folding chairs and snacks. And we sit. The park feels ours. Not a single vehicle passes on the corrugated road; the only sound is birdsong. Our attention is drawn to the bands of color on the Bungles, which grow ever more surreally orange. "This place," Bec finally says, "has a special feel to it." All I can do is nod. The child Nullah in Faraway Downs said as much of the Bungles: "There are spirits here." I'm starting to understand the reverence Australians of all stripes feel for this burned, austere, ancient land, which is still inhabited by direct descendants of the first humans who arrived here tens of thousands of years ago and who are still, generation after generation, guarding its mysteries. "The elders," Bec says, "have to tell us what stories we can tell, and how to tell them. They are in discussions now. Also, some of our words have no counterparts in English."

El Questro Homestead lodge, just 10 suites on the Chamberlain River in the immensity of the Kimberley outback.

In equal measure for the beauties of this rugged, 700,000-acre cattle station in the wilderness of the East Kimberley (they still run 3,500 head of cattle here, 2,000 of them wild) and for its El Questro Homestead, a 10-suite oasis of privacy and all-inclusive good living originally built in 1991 as a private home and guesthouse by Will Burrell, scion of the British Penguin Books fortune. It is one of the Luxury Lodges of Australia and the outback's crme de la crme, a marriage of harsh frontier landscapes and the finer things in life.

It is also, significantly, the first tourism property in all of Australia to have signed, in November 2022, an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) with the Ngarinyin people, traditional owners of this land (who call it Malabu). Not only has a vast expanse of El Questro407,000 acresbeen given to them as a "freehold" to manage as a reserve, but, as general manager Geoff Trewin tells me, "we have leased the land we are on from them for 99 years, which secures their financial future. It is a very detailed agreement, signed off on by the government, wherein we also help them develop touring and other employment, and it's being used as a benchmark for agreements with other Indigenous groups across the country. But it's early days."

Part of the pleasure of El Questro is the sheer achievement of arriving. "For many of our guests," Trewin says, "that alone is the goal. Two or three flights, a long drive, two river crossings with the water past the chassis" I did it differently. The Airvan pilot who brought me to the Bungle Bungles two days ago picked me up again at its Bellburn airstrip and, after a last farewell flyover, deposited me 30 minutes later at El Questro's private airstrip.

A Cliffside Villa at El Questro Homestead. A deep outdoor bathtub is just out of shot to the right, and the drop is 200 feet straight down to the river. There are crocs in there.

In one of El Questro Homestead's three Cliffside "villas," dramatically perched on a rocky escarpment high above the Chamberlain River gorge, with distant views, a large deck, and indoor/outdoor bathing. Note: The El Questro property has two other places to stay: the bustling hub called El Questro Station, eight miles away, which has bungalows, safari tents, and coach parks; and Emma Gorge camp, a 30-minute drive away, which has 60 tented suites. All are under the same management, but the Homestead is hands down the most high-end option. Its opening, back in the day, was covered, judging by the bound tomes of press clippings in the library, by every lifestyle publication on earth.

The boab trees (the Australian abbreviation of "baobab") at El Questro are beautifulbut best not be out and about on foot. The micky bulls (slang for wild ones) are very naughty.

Meals at the Homestead, including five-course degustation dinners, are an event, with some serious magic produced in the outback kitchen at breakfast, lunch, and dinner by New Zealand chef Gareth Newburn. (I kept some menus. Here's one dinner: kingfish ceviche with citrus, shallot, chili, and herbs; green asparagus with edamame, finger lime, truffle, and bunya nut; scallops with corn, pickled mushrooms, and chicken skin; lamb rack with carrot, pommes Anna, and salsa verde; chocolate delice with salted hazelnut ice cream, berries, and nuts.)

Feasts like this can be eaten either communally at a long table on the veranda (convivial fun) or privately, in three cliffside nooks at the edge of the Chamberlain Gorge (very romantic).

You and a fancy picnic basket are choppered to El Questros Miri Miri Falls, and a short technical hike later you arrive at the cool, deep, palm-shaded, utterly translucent pool at the foot of the falls. As Australians say, "Pretty speccy."

"It's an excellent place to do nothing at all," a surgeon from Sydney tells me during my first Homestead predinner cocktail hour. "And we've been extremely successful at it." That's one option: lounging around the pool overlooking the Chamberlain Gorge, swanning up the green lawn to the open bar, eating, repeating. But I'm with the majority (mostly well-heeled Australians who have finally made the journey to WA, with a smattering of international guests) and taking full advantage, during my three days here, of the included activities: expeditions to hot springs, gorges, waterfalls, lookouts.

For our Chamberlain River cruise, we were on a much smaller boat (five of us) and saw not another soul for the entire two hours.

No hiking boots are required for the Chamberlain Gorge boat outing. Nibbling on treats and quaffing Roederer champagne, I'm counting the adorable kangaroo-like wallabies perched like figurines in a giant cabinet-of-curiosities on the gorge's shelf-like outcroppings. And I scan the water: Lurking in there, I know, and at the opposite end of the cuteness spectrum, are the so-called salties, Australia's deadly estuary crocodiles. "They're the apex predator here," says our guide and boatman, Pete. "Been around for 240 million years, unchanged for the last 200 millionunimprovable killing machines."

But what I'm really hoping for is even a fleeting glimpse of indigenous rock art. A drone is flying along the gorge walls some distance aheadpart of El Questro's post-ILUA work with traditional owners, tribal leaders, and archaeologists to conduct a "heritage survey" of the entire property and figure out what needs to be protected and what can eventually be shown to visitors, by whom, and how. I've been told there are significant sites here, possibly including 4,000-year-old figures of Wandjina, the cloud and rain spirits from Aboriginal mythology important to communities in the Kimberley and depicted, uncannily, like helmeted characters from outer space. At one pointbut it could be an illusionI think I notice something, but Pete, admirably, neither confirms nor denies: "It's not our story to tell. At least not yet."

On my last afternoon, maybe six of us are driven to the top of an escarpment called Buddy's Point Lookout for sundowners with 360-degree views of utter, ridge-encircled emptiness. "Bloody tourists!" someone suddenly exclaims. And then we see it: tiny on a distant ridge, a single vehicle. That's how spoiled we've become. Driving back, our safari-style vehicle is enveloped in a sandstorm of red dust kicked up by the tires. It's in our eyes and noses, between our teeth. The outback is suddenly extreme and uncompromising, even in this small way. But all is well. A charming Homestead staffer is there as we pull into the driveway, with a pile of cold, wet towels on a tray.

Vineyards of the Leeuwin Estate in Margaret River.

First, because it's one of Australia's and the world's premier wine regions, yet so Western Australia: It is the world's most isolated (Africa is 5,000 miles to the west, Antarctica 2,200 miles to the south). Its ancient soils predate those of any viticultural area in Europe. And it's had the longest continuous human occupation, going back 50,000 yearsthe Wadandi people have been caretakers of this land for millennia (Margaret River's Indigenous name is Wooditup). And because it's Bordeaux with a difference: It has tasting rooms and top-notch restaurants, of coursebut also migrating whales, mobs of kangaroos, and the monstrous Indian Ocean swells of Surfers Point.

Via a reverse relay: From El Questro Homestead by four-wheel-drive back to Kununurra (90 minutes), then a commercial flight from Kununurra to Perth, where I overnighted. In the morning, a car and driver sped me over excellent roads, in three hours, to the wine country. (There is also a helicopter option often exercised, I'm told, by Perth residents with weekend homes in the wine region30 minutes.)

One of the Indian Oceanfacing villas at Margaret Rivers Injidup Spa Retreat. Time it right and you can be sipping your wine in the plunge pool while watching humpbacks breach.

Because Margaret River's venerable Cape Lodge was about to undergo a major renovation, I opted for Injidup Spa Retreat. "It's another of WA's secrets," I was told. And it felt like one: Ten serene adults-only villas hidden from view along a ridge over the Indian Ocean with private decks and plunge pools, an excellent spa, a white sand beach accessible via a narrow path upon which I never encountered a soul, and no restaurant. Who needs the hubbub? And anyway, in Margaret River, which produces more than 20 percent of Australia's premium wines, tastings and eating out are really the point.

The restaurant at Leeuwin Estates winery. settle in: lunch with pairings might take three hours and is time well spent.

Basically, a grande bouffe. With 220 wineries, 100 cellar doors (Australian for tasting rooms), and dozens of restaurants within easy driving distance (on average, 30 minutes), I had to narrow it down. Dinners were at the Cape Lodge restaurant and the informal, bustling Yarri, whose ever-changing menus are attuned to the six seasons of the Aboriginal calendar (sit up at the open kitchen and the chefs will talk you through it); they also serve some mean craft cocktails. Strong recommendation: Book a car and driver for the evenings here. Ubers are not ubiquitous, and you need to be careful about the kangaroos, which can emerge quite suddenly from among the roadside bushes.

Lunches (lovely-to-sink-into, afternoon-long affairs, with prelunch tastings, of course) were at two of the region's five founding wine estates: Vasse Felix, Margaret River's first, and Leeuwin (named for the warm ocean current that flows southward near Australia's western coast and helps create Margaret River's winegrowing climate). I kept the menu from Leeuwinprobably the best meal of this entire tripto remember the dishes and wine pairings, which I'm shopping now.

The gallery of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art at Leeuwin. If you dont have the time for gallery-hopping in perth, this is your chance.

As much as the wines themselvesLeeuwin's 2020 chardonnay is apparently the most collected white wine in AustraliaI appreciated the packaging of the "Art Series" wines. Their labels feature works by leading contemporary Australian artists, many of them Aboriginal, the originals of which, either collected or commissioned by Leeuwin owners Denis and Tricia Horgan (who, at the urging of Robert Mondavi, converted their cattle ranch into a vineyard in 1972), are on view in the estate's sprawling art gallery. On the bottle of the 2019 cabernet sauvignon is a paintingbe still, my heartof the Bungle Bungles.

Hikers along a section of the Cape to Cape track. Bring a "bather"there are protected natural pools where you can swim.

By the time my scheduled 3.5-hour hike along a section of the Cape to Cape track rolled around (its full length stretches 76 miles from the lighthouse at Cape Leeuwin in the south of Margaret River to the one at Cape Naturaliste in the north), I had to refuse all food, even the breakfast pastries proffered by my Walk Into Luxury guide, Matt Fuller, who picked me up at Injidup on my last morning (the trail runs right past it). Setting aside for the moment Bec's admonition about silence in nature, I peppered him with questions as we walked, the swells of the Indian Ocean pounding magnificently on the rocks below.

What whales can you see in these waters? "Humpbacks, blue whales, pygmies, pilots." Sharks? "The area is notorious for them, especially February to April, when the salmon arrive to spawn." How do surfers deal with it? "You think about sharks before you surf, you think about them after, but when you're surfing, you're in the moment." Snakes? "Just look at me. When I stop, you stop." Why is there almost no one here? "Because the western coast is the best-kept secret in Australia. Just lookthere is no development here. And we don't want it. What you see when you stand with your back to the ocean today is exactly what the Aborigines saw 60,000 years ago. When word gets out how good all this is, we're going to be inundated."

The Ningaloo Reef coastline is another of Western Australias UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The geography: a 160-mile fringe reefmeaning it's so close to shore you can swim or snorkel out to it (unlike the Great Barrier Reef, all of which is at least 10 miles from land). Right beyond the crashing waves, the continental shelf drops off and it's all deep watera speedway for the ocean's megafauna. Called Humpback Highway (although there's a plethora of other marine life here as well, including 300 to 500 whale sharks, the biggest fish in the world, which annually congregate here), it runs from Broome, further north, where the whales calve, down to Antarctica, where they spend the Antipodean summer. And Ningaloo, with its unparalleled proximity to the deep, is the world's best place to see themwhether from the shore as they breach (quite a sight at breakfast) or, the be all and end all, by getting into that deep water with them.

Because this natural wonder is in northwest Western Australia, it was generally unknown (again, like the Bungles, despite its UNESCO World Heritage status) except to a small circle of diving and snorkeling aficionadosand, of course, to the Indigenous Baiyungu and Thalanjyi people, traditional owners of the area, who call it Nyinggulu and who have lived in this area for 40,000 years. (The 32,000-year-old necklace in Perth's WA Museum Boola Bardip was discovered here.) But word is getting out, at least in Australia. The best-selling Australian author and conservationist, Tim Winton, released last summer a three-part documentary, Ningaloo Nyinggulu, available on the Australian Broadcasting Company.

From Perth, via a two-hour commercial flight to the small resort town of Exmouth, the northern gateway to Ningaloo. (Interestingly, Exmouth began life as a support community for a U.S. Navy base, which operated here from World War II until the 1990s and is now a joint U.S.-Australian operation.) Then it's another hour by rental car along an empty coastal road from the Learmonth airport to the lodge, inside Ningaloo Marine Park. (Look out for dingos, who like to sun themselves on the tarmac.)

There are few things as soothing as the end of the day at Sal Salis Ningaloo Reef. Bring your lantern to dinner for the walk back to your tent.

Sal Salis Ningaloo Reef is a little compound of 16 cream-colored tents (including a larger honeymoon one) that seem lost amid the dunes and grasses, steps from a white beach. As at the APT Bungle Bungle Wilderness Lodge, the tents are comfortable but simple, and shower water, if not exactly rationed, is carefully monitored (you're in a protected conservation area in an arid environment). But the overwhelming emotion you feel is, what a privilege it is to be herea feeling augmented, I must mention, by the open bar in the communal dining area and the long, convivial dinners, which feature such delicacies as duck with pumpkin puree accompanied, of course, by excellent wine pairings.

The smaller attractions on Ningaloo Reef. The camp has wet suits.

As elsewhere in Western Australia, activities abound here despite the remoteness. A frequently updated blackboard in Sal Salis's communal space lists (in addition to that day's menus) the departure times for: snorkeling (schools of tropical fish, manta rays, enormous brain corals), kayaking, and various guided gorge hikes and nature talks in the surrounding Cape Range National Park. I did all of it.

When done through an expert and sensitive small-group tour operator, the experience of swimming with a whale shark is unforgettable.

But I was here for the whales and the big fish, having booked with Exmouth's premier small group tour operator, LiveNingaloo: morning pickup, maximum of seven swimmers (with three non-swimmers allowed on the small boat that will take us over the reef into the open Indian Ocean), back at Sal Salis by 3 p.m., lunch and libations and wet suits provided.

A spotter plane flew ahead of us, communicating constantly with our captain, Murray Pattison, searching for sea animals and the right conditions. The water needs to be clear, for visibility. If he spots a female humpback with a calf, the calf must be no smaller than half the size of the mother. (If it's very young, there's a risk of her engaging in defensive behavior.) If he spots a pod, is it calm or boisterous? We wouldn't go in if they were aggressively breaching or playing, or if there were a female surrounded by males. With humpbacks, the staff explained, we wouldn't actually swim with themthey're too fast. We'd get in the water ("bunched up, in a group, no squealing, masks on"), and if we were in the right position the whales would swim right past us, 15 to 30 meters away. "They know exactly where we are in the water. They're very intelligent. There are times when the mother will lift her pectoral fin and show her calf to usor us to her calf. You see her eyes focus, taking you in."

My heart was in my throat the entire time on the boat. The open ocean was choppy, and I just felt how deep it was. It was the wildest, or most unfamiliar, environment I've ever been in. We had some near misses with the humpbackswe would slide into the water off the back of the boat, thumbs up, then something would change and we'd heave ourselves back onboard. Then a whale shark appearedseven meters long, a juvenile, and we went for it. The instructions were simpler because whale sharks swim slowly (they eat only plankton, unlike their smaller but more fearsome relatives) and, being fish, are not interactive. A few things to keep in mind when swimming alongside them: no touching, stay behind the pectoral fin, and don't get closer than four meters from the tail and three meters from its sides. And stay on the surface (i.e., no duck diving).

Our captain said, "Whale sharks are mysterious. We know they live 100-plus years in the wild, but much less in captivity. They are not migratory, but no one has successfully tracked their movements, partly because they go really deep." On my third and final swim, I was suddenly not alongside the whale shark anymore but above it. It was beneath me and growing fainter by the second, dropping into the abyss. The staff had warned us that might happen. I had just been ghosted by a giant fish. I could no longer make out the markings on its back, then not even its outline. It was just me bobbing out there, and the navy blue depths of the Indian Ocean. I have never felt so breathtakingly far away.

Executive Travel Editor

Klara Glowczewska is the Executive Travel Editor of Town & Country, covering topics related to travel specifically (places, itineraries, hotels, trends) and broadly (conservation, culture, adventure), and was previously the Editor in Chief of Conde Nast Traveler magazine.

More here:
Why Western Australia Is the Continent's Best Kept Secret - Town & Country