Flying east to west over Australia on a clear day reveals much about this vast, bizarrely beautiful, and often brutal continent. Within minutes of takeoff from Sydney heading to Perth, the navy-blue waters of the Pacific, yellow crescents of the east coast beaches, and thin bands of green where nearly 80 percent of the population huddle in coastal enclaves have vanished, making way for an expanse of arid pasture slashed by solitary roads and swaths of brown bush. Then, quite suddenly, the earth begins to glow red. For five hours, all that can be seen is an endless expanse of ocher shifting to vermilion, corrugated by ancient crags and pocked with swirling violet salt pan lakes.
As Australians, we relish the idea that we are the wild ones from the wildest continent: a nation whose identity was forged by a small population’s struggle to inhabit an immense, remote, and inhospitable landmass; a place that has always offered its people as much risk as it has reward. This is the image we have projected to the world (sometimes to the point of parody), even if the modern reality belies it. First-time visitors who come expecting endless beaches and frontier towns teeming with bizarre animals are often surprised to find that our cities are connected cosmopolitan hubs. I grew up on the east coast, in Brisbane, a collection of suburbs that resembles the sprawl in much of the developed world, and is frankly how most Australians now live. Still, it is the unfathomably vast Australian landscape that has truly shaped our national psyche.
As a child, I had no desire to travel within my own country. The youngest of four, I’d be wedged in the back of our station wagon on long, dull road trips to places that never resembled the descriptions in the books I buried myself in. I say this at the risk of being labeled a wanker (a term Aussies use when they smell pretension), but I was always drawn more to the monumental history of Europe, the electric energy of the United States, and the exotic bustle of Asia. Not that I was in the minority. Go almost anywhere in the world and you’ll encounter a young Australian with a backpack or a raucous community of expats. Moving overseas is an expected rite of passage, an antidote to Australia’s extreme isolation. Last year marked a decade since I’d moved away from home, and in that time I have rarely looked back.
Yet recently something has shifted within me, and not just because of New York’s grim winters. And so I have traveled more in Australia in the past 18 months than I had in the previous three decades, filling a bucket list of the postcard familiar, from the spiritual monolith of Uluru to the temperate forests of Tasmania and the tropical islands of Queensland. Only Australia’s most remote region, the mythical northwest, eluded me, just as it does the vast majority of Australians, let alone international visitors. In the immense expanse of The Kimberley’s Outback and the vast, pristine Ningaloo Reef, I wanted to find the purest evocation of Australia’s outsized landscape.
The Kimberley occupies a place in Australia’s collective imagination that’s a cross between Alaska for its remoteness and the Grand Canyon for its topographical drama. Covering the top sixth of Western Australia, it’s roughly the size of California, with the population of a few Manhattan blocks. Getting there is no joke: Removed from the rest of the continent by impenetrable desert, the region is about five hours by plane from Sydney or three from Perth. From there I would take a small charter plane 1,000 miles to Sal Salis, the only lodging on Ningaloo Reef, long overshadowed by Australia’s more developed Great Barrier Reef. This would be a onetime, no-effort-spared, Western frontier adventure that would forever dismiss charges that I am more interested in the foreign than the familiar—an exploration and exaltation of Australia writ large.
Exploring the Wild West from Bush to Beach in 10 Days
Stop 1: El Questro Homestead, The Kimberley
“It turns out that not everything is bigger in Texas,” says my seatmate from the Lone Star State as our plane flies over the unfolding rust-colored terrain. I arrive in Kununurra at the end of the “big dry,” the close of the tourism season and days before the “big wet.” This year, the rains cannot come soon enough. The sky is a hazy glow, and it is not yet apparent whether this is owing to the 110-degree heat conspiring with dust or to something more ominous. Here in the land of bushfire, it’s the latter. “If we get a move on, we’ll be able to get through before it cuts the road,” says the guide from El Questro Homestead, who picks me up. We fly along the road; on one side hangs a blood-red moon, and on the other a golden thread of fire licks the mountains, oddly beautiful for being part of the natural course of life here.
It takes two hours to reach El Questro, a ranch (or station, as they’re called here) named by the first owners as an homage to American Westerns. Once the region’s most challenging cattle property, with a foreboding terrain of gorges, gullies, and ridges, it was transformed into an Outback tourism operation more than two decades ago. Tin roofs and timber verandas somehow defy Aussie kitsch at the Homestead, where up to 18 guests stay in the main lodge or in smaller houses with outdoor tubs overlooking 700,000 wilderness acres.
On the first night, I’m told that a guide will pick me up before dawn and that I should pack a “cossie” (bathing suit), which makes me a little nervous given that I’d just spotted Charlie, the local six-foot freshwater crocodile, in the gorge below my bedroom. The next morning my guide —who, like his African safari peers, is a blend of concierge and park ranger—picks me up in a Land Cruiser, and we rock through the still-dark bush to a local airstrip, where a helicopter awaits. As the sun rises, we fly over the main building, now a dot dwarfed by mountains, and the pilot, Steve, points to a green gully between cliff faces. “What about I drop you off there?” he asks, to which I respond with a quizzical look. Landing on uneven rocks, Steve points toward the ravine. “Walk that way about three minutes, mate,” he says, and I do, pushing through scrub until I arrive at a 164-foot waterfall and pool hemmed by palms. “Don’t worry about crocs!” I hear him shout, and for the next hour I swim in silence by the cascading water.
The following days are filled with more adventures, ones which give the rare impression that you are the very first to have experienced them. Soon I’m back in the helicopter, this time scouring the river for the ideal place to cast for the local fish, the prized barramundi. I’ve joined a fortyish former banker turned global adventurer from Perth, who tells me the “barra” is the ultimate Aussie fish because of its “fighting spirit” and that The Kimberley is the ultimate place to catch one, because “it’s man versus nature here.” Barra season is nearly over, and we cast hundreds of times, alone in an epic gorge. After a while, it seems even the crocodiles, heads barely submerged, are rolling their eyes. Man: 0. The Kimberley: 1.
Stop 2: Sal Salis, Ningaloo Reef
Mornings at Sal Salis, a luxury tented camp on the edge of Ningaloo Reef, are like being in a psychedelic dreamscape. I lie in bed as the rising sun deepens the turquoise of the reef, yards from my tent, and a mob of wallabies gingerly hop across the dunes. Still groggy, I slip into my wet suit, wade into the Indian Ocean, and snorkel solo—that is, alongside green turtles, shoals of parrot fish, and gliding stingrays. An hour later, I resurface to find a breakfast barbecue of bacon and eggs waiting on the beach.
Although no boat is needed to explore this offshore marine garden, the government has started offering permits to swim with the humpback whales beyond the reef. And so a short distance from Sal Salis, I board a boat run by local operator Live Ningaloo, whose young marine biologist/dive instructor is out of Australia central casting: blond, tanned, and smiling broadly. After quickly relaying instructions, she pushes me into the water. I’m floating gently in the ocean when the crew suddenly start waving their hands (normally not a good sign in Aussie waters). Unsure what to do, I plunge below the surface—and discover that I’m just 50 feet from a mother and calf. Hanging there, I can feel their size and the force of their momentum through the water, as if I were standing too close to a passing bus on a busy street.
Sal Salis was opened two decades ago as a no-frills camp along the sand dunes of Cape Range National Park. Recently, though, it was transformed into Australia’s most exclusive glamping property, consisting of 15 canvas tents and one suite, all flanking an open-air pavilion set with hurricane lamps. It is more convivial than El Questro, and at sundowner drinks and communal dinners I become fast friends with two sisters from Melbourne and Tasmania who surprised their mother for her seventieth birthday by whisking her to Sal Salis to swim with the whales. Over scallops seared on the barbecue, a newly widowed Glaswegian woman leaves us all speechless with tales of her solo two-month odyssey through some of Australia’s harshest landscapes. The young honeymooning couple from Italy are less interested in the group, instead dining by a solitary lamp and arranging hearts on the beach with pale-pink pebbles coughed up from the red earth.
Sal Salis embodies a particularly Australian kind of barefoot luxury: Both guests and staff are likely to be shoeless, a stray dreadlock might pop out from under a guide’s cap, and you might be asked to carry your own luggage. It’s a way of doing things that makes sense in the camp’s improbable location and with a 12-person staff. But their humor smoothes the rough edges, and being given elite access to this edge-of-the-earth spot is the real luxury here.
The Not-So-Simple Logistics
There is no easy way to travel to Western Australia, or even between The Kimberley and Sal Salis, but once you’re out there, it makes sense to do both. From the U.S. you have to fly into Perth (about 25 hours from the East Coast, with at least one stopover, on Qantas or Cathay Pacific), which has the main international airport in the state. Also, you can’t fly from El Questro to Sal Salis unless you charter a plane (contact Falcon Jet Operations). I’d suggest spending time in Perth both before and between bush and beach trips.
Perth is newly cosmopolitan, owing in part to Australia’s recent mining boom. Make a soft landing at COMO The Treasury, a stunning colonial building in the heart of the city: Rooms and common areas are done in slouchy gray Belgian linens and accented with local wildflowers. The next day, take a commercial flight from Perth to Exmouth (two hours), spend three nights at Sal Salis, then return to Perth for a night, eating at chef David Thompson’s legendary Thai restaurant Long Chim. Fly on to The Kimberley and spend four nights at El Questro Homestead (request a cliffside room). Finally, take a connecting flight from Kununurra to Darwin.
The “big dry,” roughly May through October, is by far the best time to visit. Sal Salis is open mid-March through October, El Questro April through mid-October. For help putting a trip together, contact Aussie specialist The Tailor.
