Lake Argyle

Lake Argyle was created by damming the Ord river and is the largest man-made lake in Australia. The water is used to irrigate the agricultural land around Kununurra.

The landscape in this area is stunning. The camp site is set on a cliff overlooking an inlet of the lake and was developed from the camp used to house the workers when the dam was being built. We went on a very interesting cruise around the lake. The skipper told us a lot about the dam and knew where to find wildlife for us look at. We even went for a dip in the lake.

Wyndham

Wyndham is a small port on the Cambridge Gulf. However, the main reason for making the detour up there is the drive up to the Five Rivers Lookout. As ever in Australia, it does exactly as is says on the tin and the views of five rivers emptying into the Cambridge Gulf are spectacular.

On the Way to Wyndham

Just before we reached Wyndham, which is about as far north as you can go in Kimberly, we found a beautiful camp spot in a landscape that typifies The Kimberley. The tall spear grass, Boabab trees and red rock are the memories we’ll take with us from Kimberley.

Hall’s Creek

We stopped  near the aboriginal township of Hall’s Creek and headed down an unsealed track to find a lovely camp spot at Caroline Pool.

In the morning, on the way back to the highway, we did a side-trip off our side-trip to take a look at a geological anomaly called China Wall. It turned out to be a lovely spot by a creek.

Geikie Gorge

The National Parks in The Kimberley are still closed for the Wet season, so we have to content ourselves with travelling through the region on the sealed highway. However, we did manage to find some lovely side-trips and camping spots and the rugged red-rock scenery became more spectacular as we headed east and north. We also discovered that a benefit of coming to The Kimberley at this time of year is that everything is still very green and there are hardly any tourists.

Geikie Gorge was one diversion we made, near the aboriginal town of Fitzroy Crossing.

Horizontal Falls

Broome is on the doorstep of an area called the Kimberley about the size of Poland that is almost entirely pristine wilderness and is inaccessible during the Wet season due to flooding and in the Dry you need a serious 4WD rig to get in there. We had hoped that arriving here during the last month of the Wet, we would be able to reach some parts of the Kimberley, but it turns out we were naive.

Anyway, all is not lost as we booked on a tour to explore the amazing coast of the Kimberley and in particular the horizontal falls. The phenomenon of the falls is caused by the huge tides (up to 11m) and there are a couple of pinch points between two of the numerous islands off the coast where the flow of water is extremely fast.

The tour involved a seaplane flight over the coast to a bay near the falls and then a transfer to a power boat to go right up to and even through the small gap of white water. The skipper put the nose of the boat into the flowing water and had to rev the engines really hard just to keep the boat stationary. The whole trip was a tremendous experience.

Dinosaur Footprints

Along this part of the coast there are a number of locations where there are footprints left in the rocks by different types of dinosaurs. We happened to be in Broome when a particularly large tide was occurring, caused by the sun and the moon being in alignment (which also created the solar eclipse in the UK). At the very lowest tides you can go down to Ganthaume Point and see the exposed footprints, so we checked the tide times and got down there at first light. They are hard to find, but fortunately there was a group from the university of Queensland studying them and they were happy to point us in the right direction and explain a little bit about them.

As an added bonus, with the low tide, we found a number of different corals exposed on the rocks.

Pearling

Broome is famous for its pearling industry. Will had worked on the pearling boats here during his gap year (or three) and I had done some pearl diving in Bahrain, so we were interested to learn about the pearling in Broome. We went on a very interesting tour of the pearl farm at Willie Creek. It’s in a lovely location on the Dampier peninsula. They took us through the history of pearling in Broome and how the pearls are cultured today. In Broome, pearls grow in a quick two-year cycle because of the large tides that wash nutrients through the pearl beds.

Broome

A few hundred kilometres back we passed a sign that said ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ but nothing happened. Yesterday we crossed an unmarked line just before Broome and the heat and humidity were turned on. We’re struggling to cope but we’ve bought a large fan for the campervan and we’ve moved into a camp site with a lovely pool to jump into to cool off. You just have to slow right down and ‘slip into Broome time’.

We like Broome. It’s tastefully laid out and has some boutique shops and a laid back, cosmopolitan atmosphere. Cable beach is a great place to have a beer and watch the sun set.

The Karijinini Gorges

The Karijini is an area of red rocks and mountains cut through with deep gorges. It feels very remote here and that’s part of the attraction for us and to be able to bush camp amongst all this beauty and peace is a real privilege.

We spent a couple of days exploring many of the gorges. The reward for descending into a gorge in the heat is the swim you can take in the pools at the bottom of water falls. Having cooled off you can then walk along the bottom of the gorge alongside and sometimes inside the river at the bottom. A very memorable few days!

On the Road to Karijini National Park

Coral Bay and Exmouth were completely devastated by the cyclone Olwyn and the road to them is still closed.This is a great disappointment as a highlight of the trip for me was going to be  snorkelling and diving the Ningaloo reef which fringes the peninsula. The chances are that the reef will have been damaged and the water clarity will be very poor for a while. We didn’t want to hang around in Carnarvon waiting for things to return to normal so we decided to move on.

Our next port of call is Karijini National Park which is in the Hammersley ranges. The reality of the vastness and emptiness of Western Australia came home to us as it took two days of driving to get there. The only sign of civilisation was a lonely roadhouse selling essential but expensive petrol. The only company we had were a couple of galahs keeping an eye on us at a pit stop and occasional wedge-tailed eagles hovering around hoping for some road kill.

Evidence of the recent heavy rain was all around with full, muddy rivers and extensive sections of road under water. The desert is quickly turning green and bursting into flower.

Cyclone Olwyn

When we retired for the night we were told to expect some wind and rain from the cyclone but no more. However at 5 a.m. we were awoken by other campers packing up and leaving! Cyclones it seems are unpredictable and it was now expected to cross Carnarvon as a category 3. By 7 a.m. we would be on red alert which means you must stay put wherever you are. We were advised that the best thing would be to head for the evacuation centre in town.

Once there, the doors were firmly shut at 7 a.m. and we had to stay there until the all-clear was announced. We could only hear the cyclone as it was a windowless building, but it sounded like a jet engine. We lost power, but the emergency lighting kicked in until the batteries ran flat. So then we couldn’t even see to read and our phone batteries were flat, so we had nothing to do but sit and wait.

By late evening, the worst of the wind had died down but we were expected to be on red alert until the morning due to floods, debris and fallen power lines. Fortunately we managed to persuade them to let us out to sleep in our van in the car park.

So, the following day, we are still stuck in Carnarvon as most roads are closed and there is still no power. This means that we can’t get fuel, the shops are shut and there is no water pressure.

Carnarvon

We called in at Carnarvon to replenish supplies and get information before heading up the peninsula for the Ningaloo reef. However, we were told that the road up the peninsula was closed because cyclone Olwyn was expected to hit Exmouth and Coral Bay the next day and the area was being evacuated.

So we had no option but to sit tight in Carnarvon and wait it out. The Carnarvon space and technology museum was an unexpected point of interest. It was used during the missions to put man on the moon and enabled NASA to continue to track the probes when Houston could not see the moon. Further dishes were erected that enabled the first television pictures to be broadcast between Australia and England. A recording of that historic show was running at the museum.

In the afternoon we took a stroll down one-mile jetty and were amazed to find that the ocean had turned brown with all the silt running down with the normally dry Gascoyne river. This is from rain a few days ago inland and the cyclone hasn’t hit yet!