Turquoise Bay

Turquoise Bay is on the western side of the North West Cape in Western Australia, inside Cape Range National Park, about an hour south of Exmouth. It sits on the Ningaloo Reef, one of the very few places on earth where a fringing reef of this scale runs directly along a beach rather than sitting far offshore.

That geography is the whole point. At most reef destinations getting to coral means a boat; at Ningaloo it means walking into the water. Turquoise Bay is the best-known access point along a reef that runs some two hundred and sixty kilometres, and the reef is a World Heritage site both for its own sake and for the whale sharks that gather off it between roughly March and July.

The bay has two parts and the difference matters. The Bay side is calm and suitable for anyone. The Drift, at the southern end, is a controlled current: you enter at the sandbar, the flow carries you north over coral for several hundred metres, and you exit before the sandbar at the end. Miss the exit and the current continues out through the channel, which is why the exit point is marked and why the instruction is repeated on every sign.

Nothing is built. A car park, a long-drop toilet and shade sails; the nearest anything else is Exmouth. The park is entered on a fee and the road is sealed. There is no shop, no water and no phone signal.

A fringing reef you swim to from the sand — which almost nowhere else offers — and a drift that carries you along it and out at the point if you stay in too long. Get out where the sign says. There is a car park and nothing else, and Ningaloo is better for that.