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FEATURE
GARAANNGADDIM WESTERN AUSTRALIA
There are places in Australia that feel vast, and then there is the Kimberley— an expanse so ancient and so self-contained that it seems to operate by its own logic. In the far reaches of this landscape, carved into rust-red escarpments and fringed by mangrove-choked tides, lies one of the country’ s most improbable natural phenomena: the Horizontal Falls. Not a waterfall in the conventional sense, but something stranger and arguably more compelling, it is a place where the ocean itself appears to spill sideways through the land, surging and retreating in a rhythm older than memory.
Reaching the Horizontal Falls is part of the story, and not a small part. There are no roads that simply wander in. The journey begins in Broome or Derby, towns that already feel like the edge of something. From there, the most common route is by seaplane, lifting off from the turquoise stretch of Roebuck Bay or the tidal flats near Derby. The flight itself is a slow unveiling of the Kimberley’ s scale— ranges folding into one another in shades of ochre and charcoal, rivers braiding through the land like veins, and then the coast, fractured and wild, where the sea presses deep into the continent.
TRAVERSE 73