Day 3, June 29th

By now we're starting to get into a routine- and with group members taking turns with cooking and preparation, camp set up and pack up it's not overly arduous. We're up at dawn each day, about 5am, breakfasting with tents down, swags rolled up and the sun rising. This way we make the most of the days, sunset is about 5.30pm but as we travel East and head towards a different time zone it creeps a little earlier. Dinner is eaten round the fire because although the days are warm once the sun goes down it becomes very cold. Then we drink beer or tea and chat until exhaustion overcomes us and we head for our sleeping bags.

Today at 7am finds us standing at Manning gorge campsite, where we stayed the night, on the edge of a river. To visit Manning gorge it's necessary for us to swim the river and although we're happy with swimming generally it's a bit early and a bit cold. Being English I can't be seen to let a bit of cold water put me off and with shoes and bag packed in a tiny pull-across boat I'm soon plunging in. The sun's shining, it's a beautiful river and actually because the air temperature's low the water's not that bad and at least I'm soon awake- and wondering why I don't do this every morning.

An hours' hike once dressed again takes us down to Manning gorge and another beautiful swimming spot, plus waterfalls for the teenage boys of the group to leap off.

We continue and that night camp wild in the bush beside the river Durock. It's us and 2 grey nomads who we thought might be rather put out that their isolated camp was invaded however they seem glad for the company and inadvertently become the object of gentle parodies for the rest of the trip. The river is beautiful but also full of Salties and after dusk our guide Rob shows us how to use a torch to scan for the red reflections of their eyes. Creepy! It's also possible to scan along the ground and find spiders by the same trick- their eyes shine blue.

3 Gorges, June 28th

After a rather chilly night in a swag under the stars we walk out of camp to see Windjana gorge by the beautiful morning light. The rocks of this gorge are limestone, once part of a barrier reef 350 million years ago. We caught glimpses of our first Freshwater Crocodiles just disturbing the mirror-like surface of the water. These "Freshies" unlike their larger cousins, the "Salties" are harmless...well unless you step on them! Harmless by Oz standards.


From here we drove through the King Leopold Ranges, mountains formed by techtonic plate collision 1.5 billion years ago when the geologists think the Kimberley collided and merged with Australia. They're due a name change since modern-day Australia doesn't like naming things after Belgian perpetrators of genocide. Despite their unfortunate name they are dramatic and ruggedly attractive.

From here we continued to Bell gorge, a pretty palmed lushness, and with the sun up higher and the air warm the swimming hole under the waterfall was very inviting.

Another chance to swim at Galvans gorge, cool water and very pleasant to be in fresh water after the salt of the West Coast.

Across the Kimberley begins! 27th June

After 2 nights in Broome and just enough time to get ready again before it was time to depart on the 9 day trip across the Kimberley from Broome to Darwin! There's 2 ways to make this journey, the fast highway or the long, mostly unsealed, so rather bumpy- but much more picturesque- Gibb river road. This road is closed during the wet season when the rivers flood the plains.

The Kimberley is romantically described as Australia's last frontier- it's a vast area including much Aboriginal land, some big gorges and occasional extensive cattle stations. And a lot of open space and big skies. (anyone reading a few of these entries will begin to notice a theme!) The Gibb river road was cut through the middle of it to transport cattle.

So, it was a customary early start and heading towards Derby. Here we stopped at the Boab prison tree. Boab trees are very distinctive trees of this region, they can't be easily aged as have no rings but some are thought to be thousands of years old and their closest relative lives in Africa- curious! This notorious tree was used as a prison in the 19th century for kidnapped indigenous people and is a very sinister and ugly example.

The Aboriginal dreamtime has many stories of why things are as they are and the story goes that the Boab was a very handsome and vain tree who drove everyone crazy so that, as punishment he was pulled out of the earth, turned upside down and pushed back in again, explaining why the bare branches in winter look like roots.

As we drive it's a landscape of spiniflex grass, boab trees, yellow flowering Wattles (a type of Acacia) and occasional cows or termite mounds.

We reached camp at Windjana gorge and visited Tunnel Creek, an eerie cavern.
Before heading to camp we gathered firewood- a daily chore to ensure a nice warm campfire. Whilst the females gathered the majority of the wood this was an opportunity for the males to play with axes.

23rd June- 25th: Cape Leveque/ Dampier Peninsula

After 5 sunny lazy days in Broome it was time to travel a little again. The Dampier peninsula (named after William Dampier- the first Englishman to set foot in this and other parts of WA- then known as New Holland) is the chunk of land just North of Broome.


The first stop was Beagle Bay (with a Beagle in attendance luckily) where the church was handbuilt, using handfired bricks, by monks during WWII. The altar is decorated with mother of pearl and the church is simple yet pristine against the red dirt and rather ramshackle houses of the community.

It's a pretty chilled out trip this time and arriving at Cape Leveque where we're camping for 2 nights there's time to sit on the beautiful beach before having sunset drinks and nibbles. A long beach walk the next day and some of us spot an Osprey having breakfast. In the afternoon an Aboriginal guide takes us on a walk showing us some of the seasonal traditional bushtucker they would gather and eat. Next day a visit to Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm to learn about modern day Pearl farming. It was a beautiful spot but isolated, 3 hours drive on unmade roads back to Broome.

Broome 18th-22nd

WA is big and largely empty, this may be a considerable understatement. Many hours had been spent watching the scenery not change and it was odd to be rolling into a town with traffic lights and more than one street. It still felt isolated but isolated with everything you might need for a short time!

We arrived in Broome with more than a little accumulated red dust. So, after lunch by the spectacular Cable beach, more about that later, the main priority was trying to get clean.

Broome developed with the discovery of valuable mother-of-pearl shell and after enslaved Aborigines exhausted that which was easy to reach hard-hat diving became the way forward. Japanese emigrants were particularly good at this but conditions were terrible and many died from the "bends". These days it's not the mother-of-pearl, for with the development of plastics its demand fell, but culturing of pearls for which Broome is known. That and having 22km of pristine sandy beach rated in the top 5 beaches of the world!

I was ready for a quiet few days and easily slipped into the relaxed "Broome-time" culture, lounging on the beach and swimming in the warm sea were high on the agenda. The weather was incredible- every day sunny, high 20s though cooler at nights. Not bad for the middle of winter!

There's not an awful lot to do in Broome but the amazing weather makes it a popular Aussie holiday destination at this time of year when the south is cold. I thought I should do the tourist thing though so briefly visited the tiny town museum and a Pearl-lugger museum and browsed the boutiques selling pearls worth several thousand dollars. One day a few of us got up before dawn and took a taxi to one end of Cable beach, Gantheaume point, here at low tide it's possible to see some dinosaur footprints and after a bit of searching we found them. As the sun came up we walked back along the beach 7kms to where the bus stopped to get back into town. The sand too cold to walk on barefoot at this time in the morning and training racehorses cantering past.

In Broome there's also the oldest, still operational outdoor cinema and catching a couple of films from a deckchair under the stars was a pleasant way to pass some time. As the airport is situated more or less in the centre of town there were a couple of surprising moments when landing planes looked as though they might fly into the screen!

Another Broome "must" is camel riding on the beach. But one camel ride is probably enough for a lifetime and my memory of the discomfort in Egypt was enough to persuade me that simply photographing them silhouetted against the sunset was preferable!

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.

Karijini Part 1 (13th-17th June)

Next day it was back to Exmouth and a few chores including a new phone (which pushed the boundaries of the shops) as mine had expired unexpectedly and inconveniently.

Next day I joined with the next tour group for an early departure from Exmouth in the rain. More flat, scrubby country, sheep grazing with wide horizons and not much else. But the scenery started to change as we drove into the Pilbaras and rusty mountains rose from the red dirt. Leaving the main highway for an unsealed road we rattle into Tom Price several hundred k's north of Exmouth- an incongrous green oasis and prosperous mining town. We have a slight panic when the main fuel station is out of diesel but find an alternative where the road trains fill up- this feels even more like frontier country and you realise the importance of fuel, second only to water.

It's afternoon as we enter the Hamersley ranges and pass into Karijini National Park and the weather is great now. We stay 2 nights here at an Eco retreat. It's only sort-of camping because the tents are fixed and have bunk beds, I discover there's nothing that can't be cooked on a bbq in a bush kitchen and we share the area with not much more than spiniflex grass and termite mounds. At night the temperature drops to near zero despite the latitude, and we're all wearing hats and clothes in bed, but during the day it's into the mid 20s.