Manta Rays and Coral Bay

 After the stunning whale shark experience I had to book another trip. I decided to book a manta ray snorkel experience for two days hence. I spent the day between working in the library before heading to Cape Range National Park in the afternoon. The drive was stunning and unexpected. Along the coast the drive is fairly flat. 10 ft tall bulbous termite mounds are the majority of the topography beyond the slow rolling hills and I expected the cape range, only 20 minutes away to be the same, but I was so wrong. I followed an ancient river bed deep into the park until I reached the end of the valley. The road wound back and forth between tall cliffs and pyramidal hills covered in loose rocks. The seasonal road intersected ephemeral riverbeds, but now, during the dry season look like a sandy desert of ancient rivers. It’s clear water runs through the area during some times of the year only by the hardy vegetation following the contours. It was a spectacular drive and I loved all the colors of the landscape which varied from yellow sand to dark crimson red rocks. 

I drove to a rest area along the road to Coral Bay where I would spend the night before going into town to snorkel in the morning. 

I got up early and drove to town and caught the boat to the reef. The tour was bigger than my last with 30 people and the water was a bit rougher than 2 days before but I enjoyed chatting with the other people on the boat all day. Our first stop was the reef and we jumped in the water and were delighted by so many fish, giant clams with a blue and black zebra stripe interior, sea turtles and few feet across meandered, a skinny bright yellow fish about 4 feet long poked out of the reef. A variety of parrotfish munched on the corals. Just a whole variety of life. I do think our tour guides were a bit overwhelmed with our group though and we quickly got strung out by the strong tide. Eventually the guides gave up on having us try to swim back to the boat and instead decided to have us ride the current to the other side of the reef and get picked up. That was much more fun anyway. 

Next we headed to a sandy area where we were to find manta rays. After some were spotted we jumped into the water in small groups and swam along with the beautiful creatures. They were so lovely and graceful and I loved swimming alongside them. We swam with the bay mantas, the smaller of the two manta rays here, and in the world, but they were still quite big with a wingspan of 4 meters (12 feet). The large ocean ones can get 8 meters wide. It was so magical to get to swim with them. Absolutely incredible. On our second swim all the sudden our guide started shouting to ‘look over there’, which was very strange. I could tell she was trying to get us to look away from something. Turns out it was a 12 ft tiger shark that had come to see what we were up to. She swam at it and it left, I was a bit bummed not to see in myself, but I’m glad it decided we weren’t food. She said after that the key to scaring off sharks is to swim at them. They say that coming towards them makes them think it’s not food cause food would swim away. Idk if it’s something I’d like to test out for myself, but it’s good it worked. 

After lunch we headed back to the reef for a final snorkel where we spotted octopus, turtles, fish, and more. It was fantastic. Another incredible trip.