The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
My manta ray mission off the Coral Coast
A road trip through Western Australia gave Monty Halls the chance to witness a dramatic marine life encounter
It had all come down to this moment. I saw Jake take one final deep breath, then dive down towards the great dark shape of the manta ray beneath us. The two of them had approached each other again and again, with the manta repeatedly turning on its back to allow Jake to get close to the wickedly curved fishing hooks embedded just below her eye. Time after time, Freckles, as we had named her, had moved away at the last second, losing her nerve as the pliers he held closed in towards her cheek.
This had been going on for half an hour and, remarkable and life-affirming though it all was, I had begun to doubt whether Jake was ever going to get close enough to remove the hooks. As he drifted down towards Freckles, she turned on her back, the white of her belly luminous in the deep blue water. Jake drew ever closer, and lifted the pliers for one last attempt …
I was witness to a remarkable interaction between animal and human, the end of a long journey for me both in time and travel. It had started a week previously, as I’d set out from Perth, on Australia’s wild west coast – and earlier this month, the video of that moment went viral.
As I drove, ahead of me lay the archetypal shimmering ribbon of highway, narrowing towards a distant horizon that pulsed with the heat of the sun. To my right was desert,
passing in a blur of sand the colour of claret, and to my left was blue sea. The Coral Coast Highway stretches for
800 miles (1,300km), a distance that falls into the “nipping out for a drive” category in the vast expanse of the Australian landscape, but a good stretch for a visitor from Britain such as myself. It has the added bonus of being one of the most spectacular driving routes in the world.
As I glanced out of the car window, it dawned on me that much of the arid landscape through which the road passes might not exactly fall into the “spectacular” category, although aficionados of desert landscapes would disagree. For the rest of us, though, it is the variety of the destinations en route that makes a Western Australia road trip truly stand out, spread along the road like precious gems. Each one reveals a little more about the extraordinary land through which you are passing, and indeed the coast that meanders alongside you.
I had wanted to drive this route for as long as I can remember. Stretching from Perth all the way to Ningaloo, it holds myriad attractions for anyone interested in the natural world. It also ends in the location of one of the greatest marine encounters on earth – offering a chance to swim with the behemoth that is the whale shark.
All of this lay ahead of me, and as I watched Perth recede in my rear-view mirror (it’s a beautiful city, by the way, at least for the eight hours I’d been there prior to setting out) I was already looking forward to the first stop. This was the famed Pinnacles, a series of eerie limestone monoliths rising out of the coastal desert. It is about a 125-mile (200km) drive from the city, so the perfect distance for the Land Rover to stretch its legs at the start of a week of driving. In complete contrast to the wilderness surrounding it, the highway is immaculate, creating a silky smooth ride that could just as well be on the M5. The traffic, however, is somewhat different – seeing another car is something of an event, a cause for much excitement and waving in the more remote sections.
As I drove into Nambung National Park, I was initially underwhelmed by what I was seeing. Then again, I was looking only at the rather stumpy foothills, a series of rocky stumps akin to decayed teeth in an ochre-tinged landscape. As I rounded a corner, I was presented with a moonscape, a bizarre alien vista of surreal rock formations. As the sun set behind me, the Pinnacles came alive, burnished by copper light, until the sun finally disappeared, creating a scene of complete stillness. And then, glancing behind me, I saw that the moon had risen and was perfectly framed by limestone sculptures 30,000 years in the making. I left feeling chastened, reminding myself not to jump to conclusions quite so readily – the malaise of many a modern traveller.
After an overnight stop, I was up early to take to the skies. Geraldton Air Charter flies a short route north along the coast to get a bird’s-eye view of a feature that can only truly be appreciated from the air – Pink Lake, or Hutt Lagoon. As we soared over the lake, it presented a dazzling array of pastel hues, like an immense artist’s palette. The vivid pink of the lake, created by carotenoid algae, contrasted with the green and brown of the dunes, then the turquoise of the
The moon had risen and was framed by limestone sculptures 30,000 years in the making