Page 123 - Travel + Leisure India & South Asia (January 2020)

‘ONE OF THE

GREATEST’

Some of my co-flyers even screeched like excited birds
of prey as the Cessna rapidly dumped altitude. From
my window seat, I took a few pictures but then put
my camera aside to soak in the natural phenomenon
that David Attenborough once described as ‘one of the
greatest wonders of the natural world’.
We were over Talbot Bay, and I could see two breaks
in the hillocks across the bay. These breaks are what
cause the ‘horizontal waterfalls’. Water—moving fast due

to tidal cycles—tries to rush through these gaps, but the
Catch a bird’s sheer velocity and volume is so great that a bottleneck
eye view of the
Horizontal Falls on is created, causing a pile-up of water on one side and a
a seaplane ride. drop of up to 10 metres, called the Horizontal Falls.
From the sky, it just looked like a frothy stream.

A sunset camel Within a few moments, we landed in the bay and taxied
ride on the beach up to a floating pontoon, where we were treated to a
is a quintessential sumptuous breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, muffins, and
tourist activity in
Broome. fresh bread. But I kept myself in check, because soon
after that, we hopped on to a speedboat to see the
Horizontal Falls from up close.
Bobbing in the water just before the gap, I realised just
how monstrous the hydro forces at play were, as millions
of cubic litres of water was squeezed through the gap by
the muscle of the tide. Our skipper told us that we had
about 20 minutes before the tide became too strong and
would challenge even the 900 horses of the outboard
motors. So all of us gripped the handles and seat-backs
tightly, and the speedboat roared through the larger gap.
If I thought that the sheer walls of the ranges were too
FROM LEFT: KIAN HONG NG/EYEEM/GETTYIMAGES; RISHAD SAAM MEHTA
close in that gap, I was in for a scarier surprise at the
next one, because that gap was even smaller. In Australia,
safety is like the state religion, so I knew I was perfectly
safe. But it was terrifying and exciting all the same to
experience the raw force of nature at such close quarters.
Back at the pontoon there was another kind of
close encounter waiting. In the centre was a sunken
shark cage. There are enough heady odours around
the pontoon, so there are always sharks hanging about,
and soon, I saw grey tawny sharks come up to the cage.
They don’t have the menacing look or the scary dental
visage of the Great White, but the deckhand warned us
that tawny sharks have as many as 240 small, but sharp,
backward-facing teeth, and that a strong suck could strip
the tendons off a human arm. That warning was enough
for me to keep my hands off the cage walls.

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