Karijini Part 2

Karijini is spectacular; deep red gorges cut into the landscape of spiniflex grass and white-barked snappy gum trees, contrasting sharply with the green and with the blue sunny sky.

We spend the next 2 days visiting some of the main gorges: Joffre, Knox, Hamersley and Weano; climbing down into them along difficult grade footpaths and traversing along ledges or through the icy streams and waterholes at the bottom. The rocks are ancient, reckoned to be 2.5 billions years old - since there's been no earthquake or volcano to move and reshape them only the water to gradually erode the gorges.

It's lots of fun but a bit nerve- jangling at times particuarly getting across Spider walk by straddling a narrow chasm. At Handrail pool we make a tricky descent to a large icy pool, swim across, scramble over some rocks then swim down a channel with a rocky roof overhead, scramble some more rocks and come to the point we can go no further-the warning sign (walks are graded in Australia and we'd been on a grade 5, for grade 6 you need ropes and climbing prowess).

I'm exhausted after a day of scrambling, walking, wading and swimming but after dinner a few of us join an astomony tour. The sky is Karijini is very clear and the stars are amazing, the milky way so bright. As it's a moonless night we can be shown the Giant Emu, lots of constellations, how one of the stars of the Southern cross is actually 10 million and view Saturn through a telescope to see the beautiful rings. As ever I'm reminded at how incomprehensibly large space is...a bit like Australia.

　

From Karijini it's past Port Hedland where a tyre punctured on the rough roads is replaced and onto Pardoo roadhouse to spend the night. We sleep in swags (a canvas bag with a thin mattress in the bottom which you get into in your sleeping bag) under the stars. Next day we stop briefly at 80 mile beach then continue, on some of the most monotonous roads yet, to Broome.