Along Western Australia's remote coast, Ningaloo Reef offers a rare experience: a multi-day kayak trip into a world of extraordinary beauty and biodiversity.

Hovering on the surface, peering through my mask, I lock eyes with an ancient reptile. The green sea turtle lifts her head and we’re breathing together, staring; a fleeting moment of curiosity across species. Next, I ogle the stingrays. There's a carpet of them on the seafloor, buried in the sand with only their bulging eyeballs protruding. My introductory snorkelling session is dazzling – and because this is Ningaloo Reef, it all exists just metres from the beach.

Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, which is many kilometres offshore, Ningaloo Reef, Australia’s other coral masterpiece, sticks to the coast like glue. It’s called a fringing reef, and stretches for 260km along Western Australia’s windswept desert edge, where the coral begins just steps from the sand. Like its larger cousin, Ningaloo is Unesco World Heritage-listed, and like reefs worldwide, it now also faces man-made threats.

Many visitors come to Ningaloo, a distant 1,200km north of Perth, to swim with whale sharks, humpback whales and manta rays. They jump in with the megafauna from specialised tour boats in the deeper waters beyond Ningaloo’s sheltered lagoon, a continuous strip of aqua that extends 500m to 2km off the beach. But I’m choosing something slower and more immersive: to explore the lagoon itself on a multi-day sea kayaking and camping expedition, stopping to snorkel and explore channels that most tourists never see.

The reef's unusual proximity to land makes this trip possible, and the reef itself is made possible by perfect conditions.

"There's very little fresh water runoff," explains Dr Damian Thomson, an experimental scientist at Ningaloo for CSIRO, the Australian government research organisation. "You don't see high sediment or nutrient loads coming into the lagoon areas, and that's one of the contributors to that spectacularly clear water just straight off the shore."

Ends of the Earth

Sometimes the journey is the adventure. In Ends of the Earth, we revel in far-flung destinations that are well worth the trek.

Also spectacular is the Cape Range, part of the homelands of the Indigenous Baiyungu, Thalanyji and Yinikurtura people for millennia. Running parallel to the reef, Cape Range is an ancient coral reef, thrust upwards and eroded into canyons and subterranean caverns holding aquatic creatures like the blind gudgeon fish and the Cape Range remipede that live nowhere else on Earth. Both the reef and Cape Range are Unesco listed, and a third connected ecosystem, Exmouth Gulf, is soon to be declared a marine park.

According to Neri Grieves, senior guide and manager at local tour company Exmouth Adventure Co, expedition kayaking is the ultimate way to experience the reef.

"Being right at water level, wildlife interactions are on a more personal scale," she says. "There are moments when a turtle might pop up beside your kayak for a lazy breath or a ray glides underneath your kayak. You're really slowing down; you're taking notice of things. You're becoming........

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