Flyovers, falls and fun-filled boats: Explore a Kimberley landscape two billion years in the making

Beneath the white wings of the seaplane, the Kimberley coast is a broken pottery landscape of brown shards and splinters. Its ranges have been worn by millennia of hammering sun, wind and flash floods until flattened and scratched with red gorges.

Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures allows guests to experience one of Australia’s greatest natural wonders. A quick one-hour flight northeast of Broome will have you witnessing spectacular red rocks and confetti of rusting islands against the sapphire-blue sea of the Buccaneer Archipelago, without spotting a track or telegraph pole, let alone a building.

The sheer immensity of this raw landscape makes you feel both insignificant and elated, as you skim over the coastline and escarpments before swooping down onto Talbot Bay. As the seaplane skips across the water and the engines are turned off, the silence of the Kimberley is overwhelming.

It’s not entirely quiet though, as you soon become aware of a low rumble of water. The bright blue surface of Talbot Bay slowly swirls like the surface of a bath when the plug is pulled out. Huge volumes of water are being sucked by the Kimberley’s gigantic tides through a narrow gorge in the bay’s escarpment and into a flooded valley behind. The result is Horizontal Falls, one of the world’s most unusual and dramatic natural phenomena, described by Sir David Attenborough as ‘one of the greatest natural wonders of the world’.

The cruise around Talbot Bay sees Tawny nurse sharks patrol under your boat. Saltwater crocodiles lurk somewhere in the mangroves and you are surrounded by dramatic bent and buckled cliffs in bright orange, slashed with seams of iron ore.

With half and full-day tours, overnight tours, and air charters available, there is something for everyone in this stunning landscape two billion years in the making.