Australia’s Best Kept Secrets are WA’s parks
In December 2016, Qantas’s Travel Insider magazine published Best Kept Secrets, The Hidden Treasure of Australia as nominated and voted by the readers. Five National winners were given top honours and three of those were in WA’s Parks:
• Top Adrenaline-Pumping Experience – Horizontal Falls
Horizontal Falls
• Most Romantic Place – Karijini National Park
Karijini National Park. Photo – Colin Ingram
• Best Place to see Animals in their Natural Habitat – Montgomery Reef in the Lalang-garram / Camden Sound Marine Park.
Montgomery Reef
Montgomery Reef
While Karijini and Horizontal Falls are more well known, Montgomery Reef is just now beginning to appear on the radar for tourists looking for unique wildlife encounters and aquatic adventures. Located remotely, 20km off Doubtful Bay on Western Australia’s central Kimberley coast, is perhaps the most astonishing marine spectacle in the country and one of the least celebrated.With dramatic tide falls of up to 10m (the largest in the southern hemisphere), twice a day Australia’s largest inshore reef appears to rise up out of the sea and looms more than 5m above water line. The retreating water spills sea creatures off the Reef as though Noah’s Ark were emptying out its tanks. Fish, turtles and black-tipped reef sharks thrash and tumble down its flanks, to be swept away in the roaring mid-ocean channels that drain this emerging coral platform, leaving the reef jutting high above the sea like a treeless coral continent. Then, a few hours later it will have sunk from sight again beneath the waves, for the return of the aquatic life. (excepts from story by John Borthwick, The Australian, 2012).
