Return to Ningaloo Reef

October school holidays. Time to reconvert our car and return to our favorite remote playgrounds! Packed with our rooftop tent, our kitesurf and snorkel gear and a week of supplies, we drove off on a Friday morning and stopped at the first place where good wind was forecasted. That was some 10 hours drive and 850kms further North, in a lonely but fantastic lagoon in Shark Bay.

The good old feelings of last year's trip across the continent came back as soon as we had set up our camp and opened a beer, watching sunset over the lagoon and not seeing a single other soul for the rest of the day. The "No Worries" smiles picked up the next day when the wind pushed our kites and carried us across glassy water into the lagoon. This marked the end of our kite-less winter time. What an addictive start into the new kitesurfing season! One morning, at the 3-mile camp of Gnaraloo station, Anh-Dao woke up and had a weird and scary thought that this was quickly becoming a lifestyle she couldn't ever miss again. Imagine a perfect beach (no, not at Gnaraloo, but somewhere nearby). There's no one there. Your camp is set up just meters above the water. The kids are enjoying the calm and safe conditions, while just a few meters downwind, you ride your kite at perfect 22 knots, the entire bay just for yourself. You could keep going for hours and hours, days and days... try your freestyle tricks over and over again, until they become a natural movement in perfect flow between the air and the water. You know the kids are safe, your body does all of this without any pain. Just a dream? Not if you have at your doorstep...

Since we've got to WA last year, we are finally finding the satisfying kitesurfing conditions we'd always dreamt of: where we have the frequent opportunity of steady winds and interesting waterscapes to develop our skills. We don't need to travel the world any more as we did before. We have found what we'd been looking for, and now we're happy to hang out at the same spots again and again. Because they are simply so good. Despite returning to the same places, we never stop discovering the new, such as new friends to meet and play with for a day or share a beer; ourselves developing new skills with our toys, enabling us to experience the place in a different way; many tiny details you are not aware off at the beginning, but starting to get to know as you return to a same place at another time, such as new plants and animals, different sunset scenes, coastlines that have changed since the last winter storm, or the way our kids become aware of things and formulate their experience in their own words.

more pics on flickr: Ningaloo Reef