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| Port, Broome |
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| Stairway to the Moon |
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| Brolga near Geike Gorge |
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| At Cable Beach |
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| Tunnel Creek Road Scenery |
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| Frangipani Resort - view from the villa |
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| Back to Broome from Fitzroy |
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Photos Fitzroy Crossing and Back to Broome
Day 33 + Fitzroy Crossing and Back to Broome
What a headspin. One minute out on a baking road, covered in red dust and watching for snakes, the next sitting by the pool at a resort, looking out at waterlilies and listening to the gentle splash of a water feature.
More of that later, now where were we?
We are spending a few days in Broome before setting out again. It is Easter and the tourist trade is picking up. Cable Beach has some people on it, a little cluster of umbrellas flyspots on the immense sweep of white sand, but it is strangely pleasant to have a bit of activity and buzz around. We can only imagine how crazy it is in town at the height of the season, but this is nice.
On Monday we head out again, Zoe will be in Perth for work for the rest of her last week in Broome and then Warwick gets back, so we head for Sydney, going East, wondering what roads might be open other than the tar. “When that cirrus cloud clears,” someone said to us a couple of weeks ago, ‘That’s when the dry starts.” I make a mental note, it could come in useful, it sounds like the sort of thing you could casually drop into a conversation and sound as if you know something.
The water is going down fast everywhere, but there’s no guarantee that there won’t be roads cut still, or damage that would need repair. But it is just so tempting. We are on our way to Fitzroy Crossing when we take a dive up the road to Tunnel Creek. The sign at the turnoff says Road Closed for every section but then, leaning at an angle against a fence post, is a small one that reads 4 Wheel Drive Only. We take that as an invitation and spear off.
There is some lovely scenery, a little quarry full of water that would make a perfect camping spot, with people swimming and kayaking. “I drove through that last time we were here,” a grey nomad says. We look thoughtfully at the little lake and agree with him that there has, indeed, been a lot of rain this year. It had occurred to us, many times.
We are another half hour or so up the Tunnel Creek road, when a warning sign lights up on the dashboard. Red triangle with an exclamation mark. Probably not a good sign, and the manual agrees. Stop driving. This is a bit of a problem, as we are in woop woop and out of phone range. We stop to consider our options, sitting on the tailgate and having a cool drink. If the man who invented the Esky isn’t in heaven, there’s something wrong with the system.
Nothing is leaking, the car is driving perfectly, but the fact remains that if we keep driving and it blows up we have also rather blown our warranty. But what on earth to do; can’t drive it, can’t contact anyone, can’t repair it, shouldn’t walk for help, that’s a big no-no. Hmmm.
After a while a LandCruiser bursting at the seams with an Aboriginal family comes by. We flag them down; we have passed several communities along the way and maybe they have phone contact. They are very friendly and helpful, but no luck, no phone coverage at their destination, an Aboriginal station a few km away. If we drive out and break down, will there be other cars along? Yes.
So we try our luck, and drive back towards the main road without any problem. We are looking for somewhere to stay and are hunting for a place in our little Priceless Campsites book. Down a narrow track, don’t go too far in case we break down, then up ahead is an Aboriginal family group. We stop, R walks on to check out the spot, I stay and have a chat.
Grandma is reclining on a foam mattress, with a toddler climbing over her. Several children are milling around. Two women nod and smile shyly, duck their heads.
They have been fishing. There is a dead sawfish on the ground, with skin instead of scales. The little boys are excited, they nudge it with their feet.
“ ’E bleedin’, one says.
“How do you cook it?”
“In the fire.”
Of course; they could be forgiven for saying “der”.
They are nibbling something, what is it? Gooseberries. A man comes up from the river, and the group gathers up their belongings and heads off. R says the campsite isn’t really suitable for the Rocket and we turn to go. “Give us a lift?” one of the boys calls out with a cheeky grin. We point to the back, no room for a dozen people. We pause to let them straggle past. The boys crowd up to look in the window. One holds out a gooseberry to me; would I like one? He explains that I need to take off the papery skin. It has a sweet and unfamiliar fruity taste.
Geike Gorge, a famous beauty spot, is just up the road a few km, so we decide to go there and camp. It’s not a camping area, but we figure we have an excuse, if we are challenged. We don’t bother to look around, and the boat trips up the gorge haven’t yet started, so we didn’t get the feel of it at all, except to note that the flood that has roared through recently has left debris at shoulder height on the trees. Another place on the growing list of sights to see, when we come back in the dry season some future year.
R gets out in the night and is frightened half to death by rustling in the undergrowth; we are conscious of the possibility of putting our foot on a croc in the dark in places like this. Who would get the biggest fright? Don’t know, but our reflexes haven’t been honed since the days of the dinosaurs for just this kind of confrontation, so we wouldn’t want to put any money on us coming out on top. Talking to people later, it was probably feral pigs; probably a lot better. He lives to tell the tale, anyway.
In the morning we are accosted by an aggressive man who tells us in no uncertain terms that there is No Camping. No amount of explanation will shut him up until R asks him who he is: implication “Are you a Ranger?” He drives off, giving us a death stare.
We are leaving anyway, on our way (hopefully) to Fitzroy Crossing to ring Land Rover 24/7 roadside assistance (if you happen to be somewhere from which you can actually call them). As we go we think of strategies: maybe one of us should stay with the Rocket and one should go back; or maybe we should see if we can leave it in the police yard and both go back.
Just as we get there we see a sign for The Crossing Inn and camping area. We spear off to have a look. Merinda at Reception, a big, slow- moving, slow-talking country girl, is welcoming. There is space available, the camping area is fenced and locked at night. We set up, explore. There is a restaurant, don’t get your hopes up for anything fancy, and a bar decorated liberally with signs: “No Spitting, No Abusive Behaviour, No Humbugging, No Bad Language, Police Will Be Called!” We decide to mind our Ps and Qs.
The office also has a very old wall-sized photo of the reason for the town’s name: a mob of cattle being moved across the river by a drover. How remote Fitzroy Crossing would have been in those days.
Who would have thought; the nearest place we can deal with the car is Broome, 400 km away, backwards. It’s Anzac Day, the operator doesn't have their phones on, according to L-R Assistance. Could have to wait for him to get over his hangover tomorrow morning, we think, so much for 24/7. Can’t expect miracles, I guess, it is the tropics. But after a bit of a wait a tow truck is on its way and arrives after a few hours.
The driver, we never did find out his name, is wiry, aggressive, bad-tempered, sour-smelling, with a straggly little bikies beard and wearing a t-shirt with JiggyJig across the chest. Before we have even left the camping area he has snarled at R. Fortunately there is a back seat in the truck cab and we settle ourselves there and keep our heads down, listen to music on our headphones and doze. The one comment we make gets a rude response, and his only conversation is pointing out a group of guards from the refugee detention centre at Derby who are sitting at a roadhouse where we stop for a couple of minutes; he launches into a fierce diatribe about how he would handle asylum seekers that includes sinking their boats, shooting them in the water and saying nothin’ about it. He then lapses into a brooding silence again for the next couple of hundred km.
Back in Broome, who would have thought. Weirdly, Zoe is also here, having cancelled her plans to be in Perth in favour of teleconferencing, so we get to spend a few more days together.
We decide that we might as well become tourists, not much choice, really, so we go to the tourist information office looking hopefully for more things to do. Now Broome is a nice little tourist town, but the range is limited and we have knocked most things off the list already; we do our best, however. The dinosaur footprints in the rocks at Gantheaume Point, the history boards along Shady lane, fish and chips at the restaurant at the Port. We do walks along the beach, look at the sunsets, have a drink at Zanders at Cable Beach with hordes of newly arrived tourists suddenly crowding the bar and the lawns.
We see a couple of movies in the deck chairs at Sun Pictures. Treat ourselves to Choc Tops.
The Stairway to the Moon comes at 6.33pm one evening; it is a totally predictable combination of tide, time, full moon, which results in a ladder of strips of light from the water’s edge to the moon at sunset. It’s stunning and we dine looking at the spectacle but, honestly, we have run out of things to do.
So we head for the beach, do nothing for days on end but laze around, swim, take walks, keep house for Zoe. The water is warm, soft, flat, an improbable number of blues and greens reaching to the vast unbroken horizon. We are swimming one day when I feel a little tingle around my middle. Conscious of the possibility of Irrukanji stingers, which although very unlikely at this time of year can occur, I have a shower and then splash on some vinegar from the bottles strategically placed as first aid near the beach. I had said to Zoe previously, “Well, they say it is incredibly painful, but after all, it can’t kill you.” “Actually,” she says, “People do die.” So I check with the lifeguard, who reassures me, but cautions me that Irrukanji stings usually take 30 minutes to develop their excruciating pain.
I consider this thoughtfully, but I’m sure it’s not Irrukanji. It is, however, something more minor: less lethal stingers that also lurk in the water. I develop a violent rash that lasts a week, itching distractingly even with antihistamines and local anaesthetic lotion, and probably leaving scars. I sure wouldn’t want to meet an Irrukanji; I have a greatly increased respect for the thought of it.
Warwick comes home, with his Dad; they will be driving back to Sydney across the Tanami Track. My Tanami and outback adventure has ended, not with a bang but with a computer malfunction on the dashboard display. I have run out of time and have to go home, I will fly back on the same plane as Zoe. My brother is flying over to drive back with R on a Boys’ Own Adventure.
As everything is packed in Zoe’s house except for 3 plates, three towels, when Warwick and Len arrive R and I move to a tourist resort, the Frangipani, near Cable Beach, paid for by land Rover. It is surreal, we are spending the days beside the pool, we could be in a resort anywhere in Bali, Thailand, Fiji, a thousand tropical paradise destinations.
You just never know what to expect, do you, that’s half the fun.
More of that later, now where were we?
We are spending a few days in Broome before setting out again. It is Easter and the tourist trade is picking up. Cable Beach has some people on it, a little cluster of umbrellas flyspots on the immense sweep of white sand, but it is strangely pleasant to have a bit of activity and buzz around. We can only imagine how crazy it is in town at the height of the season, but this is nice.
On Monday we head out again, Zoe will be in Perth for work for the rest of her last week in Broome and then Warwick gets back, so we head for Sydney, going East, wondering what roads might be open other than the tar. “When that cirrus cloud clears,” someone said to us a couple of weeks ago, ‘That’s when the dry starts.” I make a mental note, it could come in useful, it sounds like the sort of thing you could casually drop into a conversation and sound as if you know something.
The water is going down fast everywhere, but there’s no guarantee that there won’t be roads cut still, or damage that would need repair. But it is just so tempting. We are on our way to Fitzroy Crossing when we take a dive up the road to Tunnel Creek. The sign at the turnoff says Road Closed for every section but then, leaning at an angle against a fence post, is a small one that reads 4 Wheel Drive Only. We take that as an invitation and spear off.
There is some lovely scenery, a little quarry full of water that would make a perfect camping spot, with people swimming and kayaking. “I drove through that last time we were here,” a grey nomad says. We look thoughtfully at the little lake and agree with him that there has, indeed, been a lot of rain this year. It had occurred to us, many times.
We are another half hour or so up the Tunnel Creek road, when a warning sign lights up on the dashboard. Red triangle with an exclamation mark. Probably not a good sign, and the manual agrees. Stop driving. This is a bit of a problem, as we are in woop woop and out of phone range. We stop to consider our options, sitting on the tailgate and having a cool drink. If the man who invented the Esky isn’t in heaven, there’s something wrong with the system.
Nothing is leaking, the car is driving perfectly, but the fact remains that if we keep driving and it blows up we have also rather blown our warranty. But what on earth to do; can’t drive it, can’t contact anyone, can’t repair it, shouldn’t walk for help, that’s a big no-no. Hmmm.
After a while a LandCruiser bursting at the seams with an Aboriginal family comes by. We flag them down; we have passed several communities along the way and maybe they have phone contact. They are very friendly and helpful, but no luck, no phone coverage at their destination, an Aboriginal station a few km away. If we drive out and break down, will there be other cars along? Yes.
So we try our luck, and drive back towards the main road without any problem. We are looking for somewhere to stay and are hunting for a place in our little Priceless Campsites book. Down a narrow track, don’t go too far in case we break down, then up ahead is an Aboriginal family group. We stop, R walks on to check out the spot, I stay and have a chat.
Grandma is reclining on a foam mattress, with a toddler climbing over her. Several children are milling around. Two women nod and smile shyly, duck their heads.
They have been fishing. There is a dead sawfish on the ground, with skin instead of scales. The little boys are excited, they nudge it with their feet.
“ ’E bleedin’, one says.
“How do you cook it?”
“In the fire.”
Of course; they could be forgiven for saying “der”.
They are nibbling something, what is it? Gooseberries. A man comes up from the river, and the group gathers up their belongings and heads off. R says the campsite isn’t really suitable for the Rocket and we turn to go. “Give us a lift?” one of the boys calls out with a cheeky grin. We point to the back, no room for a dozen people. We pause to let them straggle past. The boys crowd up to look in the window. One holds out a gooseberry to me; would I like one? He explains that I need to take off the papery skin. It has a sweet and unfamiliar fruity taste.
Geike Gorge, a famous beauty spot, is just up the road a few km, so we decide to go there and camp. It’s not a camping area, but we figure we have an excuse, if we are challenged. We don’t bother to look around, and the boat trips up the gorge haven’t yet started, so we didn’t get the feel of it at all, except to note that the flood that has roared through recently has left debris at shoulder height on the trees. Another place on the growing list of sights to see, when we come back in the dry season some future year.
R gets out in the night and is frightened half to death by rustling in the undergrowth; we are conscious of the possibility of putting our foot on a croc in the dark in places like this. Who would get the biggest fright? Don’t know, but our reflexes haven’t been honed since the days of the dinosaurs for just this kind of confrontation, so we wouldn’t want to put any money on us coming out on top. Talking to people later, it was probably feral pigs; probably a lot better. He lives to tell the tale, anyway.
In the morning we are accosted by an aggressive man who tells us in no uncertain terms that there is No Camping. No amount of explanation will shut him up until R asks him who he is: implication “Are you a Ranger?” He drives off, giving us a death stare.
We are leaving anyway, on our way (hopefully) to Fitzroy Crossing to ring Land Rover 24/7 roadside assistance (if you happen to be somewhere from which you can actually call them). As we go we think of strategies: maybe one of us should stay with the Rocket and one should go back; or maybe we should see if we can leave it in the police yard and both go back.
Just as we get there we see a sign for The Crossing Inn and camping area. We spear off to have a look. Merinda at Reception, a big, slow- moving, slow-talking country girl, is welcoming. There is space available, the camping area is fenced and locked at night. We set up, explore. There is a restaurant, don’t get your hopes up for anything fancy, and a bar decorated liberally with signs: “No Spitting, No Abusive Behaviour, No Humbugging, No Bad Language, Police Will Be Called!” We decide to mind our Ps and Qs.
The office also has a very old wall-sized photo of the reason for the town’s name: a mob of cattle being moved across the river by a drover. How remote Fitzroy Crossing would have been in those days.
Who would have thought; the nearest place we can deal with the car is Broome, 400 km away, backwards. It’s Anzac Day, the operator doesn't have their phones on, according to L-R Assistance. Could have to wait for him to get over his hangover tomorrow morning, we think, so much for 24/7. Can’t expect miracles, I guess, it is the tropics. But after a bit of a wait a tow truck is on its way and arrives after a few hours.
The driver, we never did find out his name, is wiry, aggressive, bad-tempered, sour-smelling, with a straggly little bikies beard and wearing a t-shirt with JiggyJig across the chest. Before we have even left the camping area he has snarled at R. Fortunately there is a back seat in the truck cab and we settle ourselves there and keep our heads down, listen to music on our headphones and doze. The one comment we make gets a rude response, and his only conversation is pointing out a group of guards from the refugee detention centre at Derby who are sitting at a roadhouse where we stop for a couple of minutes; he launches into a fierce diatribe about how he would handle asylum seekers that includes sinking their boats, shooting them in the water and saying nothin’ about it. He then lapses into a brooding silence again for the next couple of hundred km.
Back in Broome, who would have thought. Weirdly, Zoe is also here, having cancelled her plans to be in Perth in favour of teleconferencing, so we get to spend a few more days together.
We decide that we might as well become tourists, not much choice, really, so we go to the tourist information office looking hopefully for more things to do. Now Broome is a nice little tourist town, but the range is limited and we have knocked most things off the list already; we do our best, however. The dinosaur footprints in the rocks at Gantheaume Point, the history boards along Shady lane, fish and chips at the restaurant at the Port. We do walks along the beach, look at the sunsets, have a drink at Zanders at Cable Beach with hordes of newly arrived tourists suddenly crowding the bar and the lawns.
We see a couple of movies in the deck chairs at Sun Pictures. Treat ourselves to Choc Tops.
The Stairway to the Moon comes at 6.33pm one evening; it is a totally predictable combination of tide, time, full moon, which results in a ladder of strips of light from the water’s edge to the moon at sunset. It’s stunning and we dine looking at the spectacle but, honestly, we have run out of things to do.
So we head for the beach, do nothing for days on end but laze around, swim, take walks, keep house for Zoe. The water is warm, soft, flat, an improbable number of blues and greens reaching to the vast unbroken horizon. We are swimming one day when I feel a little tingle around my middle. Conscious of the possibility of Irrukanji stingers, which although very unlikely at this time of year can occur, I have a shower and then splash on some vinegar from the bottles strategically placed as first aid near the beach. I had said to Zoe previously, “Well, they say it is incredibly painful, but after all, it can’t kill you.” “Actually,” she says, “People do die.” So I check with the lifeguard, who reassures me, but cautions me that Irrukanji stings usually take 30 minutes to develop their excruciating pain.
I consider this thoughtfully, but I’m sure it’s not Irrukanji. It is, however, something more minor: less lethal stingers that also lurk in the water. I develop a violent rash that lasts a week, itching distractingly even with antihistamines and local anaesthetic lotion, and probably leaving scars. I sure wouldn’t want to meet an Irrukanji; I have a greatly increased respect for the thought of it.
Warwick comes home, with his Dad; they will be driving back to Sydney across the Tanami Track. My Tanami and outback adventure has ended, not with a bang but with a computer malfunction on the dashboard display. I have run out of time and have to go home, I will fly back on the same plane as Zoe. My brother is flying over to drive back with R on a Boys’ Own Adventure.
As everything is packed in Zoe’s house except for 3 plates, three towels, when Warwick and Len arrive R and I move to a tourist resort, the Frangipani, near Cable Beach, paid for by land Rover. It is surreal, we are spending the days beside the pool, we could be in a resort anywhere in Bali, Thailand, Fiji, a thousand tropical paradise destinations.
You just never know what to expect, do you, that’s half the fun.
Monday, April 18, 2011
A tale of survival around Derby
Days at Birdwood Downs start with a little breeze, birdsong, just a hint of the heat that will follow and the gentle sound of the staff breakfast gong from the corrugated iron buildings through the trees. There are little wallabies everywhere, maybe potoroos, delicate and small, a fine silky grey colour, that watch us and then hop neatly away. We sit around reading, take a long walk to nowhere and back, read, chat.
This is always a land of surprises; Hans far from being a sad loner, turns out to be having the time of his life , having chucked in his career as a IT management consultant in the city and taken to managing this station. Is he married? The horse-woman calls him “honey”, so who knows.
We go into Derby to explore. If I say that the tourist information suggests Hug a Boab, and Take a Walk on the Tidal Mudflats, it might give you a clue; discovering Derby isn’t something that will take us long. But we do go to look at the jetty. Derby has been a centre for loading cattle, later iron ore and other mining things and there is a long, rather picturesque jetty. There’s a little restaurant and we make a snap decision to eat there and watch the sunset. It’s a great idea; the jetty silhouetted in front of a tropical sunset is a great way to spend an hour or so. We hardly talk, just sit and watch as it flames into night.
What isn’t so fantastic is the food; in this land of fishing, the barramundi sounded attractive, but when it arrives it is a thin fillet of wet fish that has clearly come out of the freezer. Oh well, the waitress friendly and cheerful and you can’t have everything.
We drive back to Birdwood Downs and settle in for the night. But of course before long we want to move and we unhitch the Rocket and take off up the Gibb. It is scrubby country, little low bushes, the road lying out straight, but as we come over one small crest and onto the flat there is a man standing beside the road flagging us down.
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m bogged up there, been there since 10 last night. Could you give me a lift just back to mobile range?”
He is spattered with grey mud, wild-haired, with no hat, no water, his shirt draped over his head. He hasn’t wasted his time going to the dentist over the last twenty or thirty years. He is evidently in distress. There is a minimum security prison back a bit, and we wonder what his story is, but you can’t just leave him there beside the road. He gets in the back seat and we turn the car round and head back into Derby; I keep an eye on him and R is on full alert.
To begin with he seems quite rational, but pretty soon he slumps down on the back seat, groaning and swearing softly to himself. He tells us a few things but they don’t add add up. Are there really two cars bogged? Does he have a mate out there? He seems quite confused. We have given him some water. After a little while he brings it up again; fortunately he has been able to give us a few seconds warning to stop.
He raises his head a little bit, “Geez, I think you came along just in time, “he says in a weak voice. He hunches over again, rocking, his eyes closed. After a while he adds, “10 k out of town and you could die by the side of the road.” It’s true, It is becoming clear that he is suffering from dehydration and heatstroke and it was a near thing.
When we get close to Derby his mobile suddenly rings. It is his wife. “Come home quick, I feel like shit, I might need to go to the hospital.” We take him to his house. He climbs down from the car, staggers across the lawn, turns on a hose and pours water on himself. He has been begging for ice, but we didn’t have any, and he needs to cool down urgently. He can hardly hold the hose.
His wife arrives; when she gets out of the Toyota she is wearing a Derby Hospital polo shirt, so he is obviously now in safe hands. Somehow with her neat pony tail and clean clothes she doesn’t look as if she would be his wife, but this is another country, things are different here.
It takes a few minutes to get him up; only the threat of calling an ambulance makes him stagger to his feet. He climbs slowly into the car, barefooted, with a towel around his shoulders, and they drive off.
He has said that he owns the Bait and Tackle shop in town, Big Barra. We’ve noticed the signs, it is almost the biggest building in town. “Come in tomorra, I’ll fix you up,” he croaks. Next day, back in Broome, we track down the phone number and call to see if he's ok. Someone answers. “Maybe you can help us. We picked up a bloke up the Gibb yesterday. Does he work there?”
“Yes, it’s my son, I’m mindin’ the shop for ‘im. He’s in hospital for a couple of days on a drip.” We ask him to pass on our regards and that we are pleased to hear he made it. “Yes”, says his Dad, and after a pause, ”I reckon it was real lucky you came along just then.”
This is always a land of surprises; Hans far from being a sad loner, turns out to be having the time of his life , having chucked in his career as a IT management consultant in the city and taken to managing this station. Is he married? The horse-woman calls him “honey”, so who knows.
We go into Derby to explore. If I say that the tourist information suggests Hug a Boab, and Take a Walk on the Tidal Mudflats, it might give you a clue; discovering Derby isn’t something that will take us long. But we do go to look at the jetty. Derby has been a centre for loading cattle, later iron ore and other mining things and there is a long, rather picturesque jetty. There’s a little restaurant and we make a snap decision to eat there and watch the sunset. It’s a great idea; the jetty silhouetted in front of a tropical sunset is a great way to spend an hour or so. We hardly talk, just sit and watch as it flames into night.
What isn’t so fantastic is the food; in this land of fishing, the barramundi sounded attractive, but when it arrives it is a thin fillet of wet fish that has clearly come out of the freezer. Oh well, the waitress friendly and cheerful and you can’t have everything.
We drive back to Birdwood Downs and settle in for the night. But of course before long we want to move and we unhitch the Rocket and take off up the Gibb. It is scrubby country, little low bushes, the road lying out straight, but as we come over one small crest and onto the flat there is a man standing beside the road flagging us down.
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m bogged up there, been there since 10 last night. Could you give me a lift just back to mobile range?”
He is spattered with grey mud, wild-haired, with no hat, no water, his shirt draped over his head. He hasn’t wasted his time going to the dentist over the last twenty or thirty years. He is evidently in distress. There is a minimum security prison back a bit, and we wonder what his story is, but you can’t just leave him there beside the road. He gets in the back seat and we turn the car round and head back into Derby; I keep an eye on him and R is on full alert.
To begin with he seems quite rational, but pretty soon he slumps down on the back seat, groaning and swearing softly to himself. He tells us a few things but they don’t add add up. Are there really two cars bogged? Does he have a mate out there? He seems quite confused. We have given him some water. After a little while he brings it up again; fortunately he has been able to give us a few seconds warning to stop.
He raises his head a little bit, “Geez, I think you came along just in time, “he says in a weak voice. He hunches over again, rocking, his eyes closed. After a while he adds, “10 k out of town and you could die by the side of the road.” It’s true, It is becoming clear that he is suffering from dehydration and heatstroke and it was a near thing.
When we get close to Derby his mobile suddenly rings. It is his wife. “Come home quick, I feel like shit, I might need to go to the hospital.” We take him to his house. He climbs down from the car, staggers across the lawn, turns on a hose and pours water on himself. He has been begging for ice, but we didn’t have any, and he needs to cool down urgently. He can hardly hold the hose.
His wife arrives; when she gets out of the Toyota she is wearing a Derby Hospital polo shirt, so he is obviously now in safe hands. Somehow with her neat pony tail and clean clothes she doesn’t look as if she would be his wife, but this is another country, things are different here.
It takes a few minutes to get him up; only the threat of calling an ambulance makes him stagger to his feet. He climbs slowly into the car, barefooted, with a towel around his shoulders, and they drive off.
He has said that he owns the Bait and Tackle shop in town, Big Barra. We’ve noticed the signs, it is almost the biggest building in town. “Come in tomorra, I’ll fix you up,” he croaks. Next day, back in Broome, we track down the phone number and call to see if he's ok. Someone answers. “Maybe you can help us. We picked up a bloke up the Gibb yesterday. Does he work there?”
“Yes, it’s my son, I’m mindin’ the shop for ‘im. He’s in hospital for a couple of days on a drip.” We ask him to pass on our regards and that we are pleased to hear he made it. “Yes”, says his Dad, and after a pause, ”I reckon it was real lucky you came along just then.”
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Broome to Horizontal Falls
We’re standing beside a tiny Cessna seaplane at Broome airport when I glance down and realise with a start that the pilot is wearing slide-on sandals. Not fancy Teva tropical footwear, but a pair of plastic sandals from Best and Less. I hope the maintenance on the plane is less casual. Heck, here we are, though, and the pilot is old enough to fly a bombing mission over France, so it will probably be fine.
We are heading for the Horizontal Falls, an hour’s flight away on a tip of land on the Buccaneer Archipelago. There are no roads at all on the map, and it is all restricted entry Aboriginal land, so we can’t drive there, but it sounds as if it is worth a look, so we are amusing ourselves by having a tourist outing.
We load onto the plane, methodically so as not to tip it over, fly for an hour, then step out onto the pontoon. Three young blokes in board shorts, uniform shirts and bare feet are waiting for us. They are laid back, friendly, obviously having a good time. It’s understandable; they have almost certainly narrowly escaped becoming plumbers. I can’t remember what they were called, but they are probably all Brett. In a previous generation they would all have been Darren. I listen, there isn’t a g on ing among them; they come from the land of AFL, fishing and utes.
Into the jet boat and off to the Horizontal Falls. This is a pair of narrow channels between two headlands of rock. Too much water trying to squeeze through gives a white-water effect. What did he say? 1 million litres moving through in 3 or 4 seconds? As we look ahead we see that the water is banked up behind the boiling turmoil, a smooth mound pressing forward. The boy on the tiller guns the engine and with a huge spray of water we crash through the gap. Then with a roar of the motor we go up and over the top of that hill of water before bursting out onto a vast oily-smooth lake on the other side.
There’s an appropriate amount of screaming and laughing as we go back through several times. The tide here rises 12 metres, and it is only possible to do it safely at a couple of times in the day. One of the boys went through in a banana boat last week. They’ve been out here for a month straight and I guess at 20 years old you have to do something life-threatening just for fun. They reckon it will be on uTube in a day or two.
back at the pontoon we lok at one of the atractions; a shark tank with some languid sharks swimming around; they are outside, though and we get in the tank and peer at them through a glass window. One of the girls jumps back. “That was really scary,” she says, gasping, laughing with fright. “I’ve never looked a shark in the eye before.” I don’t know that they would bother to eat us, though, even if they could get to us; they are kept well fed by the boys, to keep them hanging around for the tourists to look at. Despite my theory I keep the cage between me and the sharks as they circle.
The boys serve up a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and we dig in, sitting on the little cruise boat gazing at the astounding scenery. It’s the Cape Leveque area, at the opposite point of King Sound, and it is spectacular. Massive cliffs, with trees growing straight out of the red rock, heaving stripes of cliff face where the land has moved, groaned. A black line way up there shows where the high tide reaches. There is an inlet, Cyclone Creek, so sheer and narrow that the pearling luggers would run there for cover when a cyclone roared over the area.
The whole area is so full of inlets, islands, treacherous currents and tides, that it has never been fully charted. You could take a boat and live a solitary life on any patch of land here, except for the tourist planes spotting you. You’d need to like fish, and you’d need to find a way to get fresh water, but of course, the Aborigines worked that out a long time ago.
But it is a treat to fly over, some of the most beautiful scenery we have seen anywhere in the world. It definitely figures on our top ten list. We skate across the water taking off, then rise. Before we are even in the air, the boys have their shirts off. Then we are away. Just half an hour across the archipelago, looking down at the thousand islands, rocky and sheer, poking up out of the teal blue sea. Then we fly down the coast back to Broome.
We are going to poke our noses onto the Gibb River Road, see how far we can get. Maybe closed doesn’t really mean closed, and we are still testing out our options for getting home. The weather is hot, not a cloud in the sky. Surely everything is drying out. A few km out there seems to be a wheel wobble, and we spend about 100 km trying to decide if it needs attention. We had a tyre plugged in Broome. “Will it need a wheel balance?” R asked the bloke. “Nah, she’ll be right,” he said. Broome-speak for, “It’s too hot to be bothered.”
When we get to Derby and stop at a servo, there is a tyre place attached. Most of the employees would need to be lined up to make a full set of teeth, but the owner is well dressed, well spoken. What’s his story, we wonder. Yes, it needs a wheel balance, and, by the way, have you noticed some damage to another tyre, I wouldn’t leave that on the front if I were you, not on a vehicle like this. Does that mean that blowouts are only fatal in crappy cars? “He means that ours can go fast on the highway,” explains R. It’s going to take me a lot longer to be able to interpret the abbreviated language of the outback bloke. Although they speak so slowly that you can roll it around in your head for a while trying to work it out before they move on.
But after an hour or so, for which they charge practically nothing, we are on our way and heading for Birdwood Downs, a working station 13 km along the Gibb. Sorry, get it right, up the Gibb. We pull in, looking for someone. There is a camping symbol on the map, and as free camping is no longer permitted this is where we are headed. We pull past the sheds, stop when we see someone.
A wiry, compact man in stubbies, ancient denim shirt, work-boots, stops and looks at us. His face is shiny with sweat and he has a Dutch accent. Hans, he came here a few years ago, then again, and finally arrived for good and has been here ever since. Living a solitary life, working on the station, no ties, no commitments. We are a bit early, the season hasn’t really started, but he directs us where to go, collects $25 and leaves us to it.
There is no view, but the ground is flat, the birds are singing and there are lots of shady trees. Not a sound but one little plane coming back from the trip we have just done; there is absolute peace. We shower and, cool and comfortable as the heat of the day drops, sit outside watching the sunset.
Hans has told us that everything is still closed, that someone tried to go up one of the roads a week ago and appeared back at the homestead having walked 20 km to get help for his bogged vehicle. So we think we will go and take a peek, leaving the Rocket at Birdwood Downs for another night. Just sneak along the Gibb and see what it looks like. Every dry day will make a difference, but after this wet season, it may take a long time to dry out; we’ll see. We now have several plans for our return route, but we can’t decide on any of them yet, until much closer to the day. But we laughed yesterday: “We can now say we have been up the Gibb – 13 km of it anyway.”
We are heading for the Horizontal Falls, an hour’s flight away on a tip of land on the Buccaneer Archipelago. There are no roads at all on the map, and it is all restricted entry Aboriginal land, so we can’t drive there, but it sounds as if it is worth a look, so we are amusing ourselves by having a tourist outing.
We load onto the plane, methodically so as not to tip it over, fly for an hour, then step out onto the pontoon. Three young blokes in board shorts, uniform shirts and bare feet are waiting for us. They are laid back, friendly, obviously having a good time. It’s understandable; they have almost certainly narrowly escaped becoming plumbers. I can’t remember what they were called, but they are probably all Brett. In a previous generation they would all have been Darren. I listen, there isn’t a g on ing among them; they come from the land of AFL, fishing and utes.
Into the jet boat and off to the Horizontal Falls. This is a pair of narrow channels between two headlands of rock. Too much water trying to squeeze through gives a white-water effect. What did he say? 1 million litres moving through in 3 or 4 seconds? As we look ahead we see that the water is banked up behind the boiling turmoil, a smooth mound pressing forward. The boy on the tiller guns the engine and with a huge spray of water we crash through the gap. Then with a roar of the motor we go up and over the top of that hill of water before bursting out onto a vast oily-smooth lake on the other side.
There’s an appropriate amount of screaming and laughing as we go back through several times. The tide here rises 12 metres, and it is only possible to do it safely at a couple of times in the day. One of the boys went through in a banana boat last week. They’ve been out here for a month straight and I guess at 20 years old you have to do something life-threatening just for fun. They reckon it will be on uTube in a day or two.
back at the pontoon we lok at one of the atractions; a shark tank with some languid sharks swimming around; they are outside, though and we get in the tank and peer at them through a glass window. One of the girls jumps back. “That was really scary,” she says, gasping, laughing with fright. “I’ve never looked a shark in the eye before.” I don’t know that they would bother to eat us, though, even if they could get to us; they are kept well fed by the boys, to keep them hanging around for the tourists to look at. Despite my theory I keep the cage between me and the sharks as they circle.
The boys serve up a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and we dig in, sitting on the little cruise boat gazing at the astounding scenery. It’s the Cape Leveque area, at the opposite point of King Sound, and it is spectacular. Massive cliffs, with trees growing straight out of the red rock, heaving stripes of cliff face where the land has moved, groaned. A black line way up there shows where the high tide reaches. There is an inlet, Cyclone Creek, so sheer and narrow that the pearling luggers would run there for cover when a cyclone roared over the area.
The whole area is so full of inlets, islands, treacherous currents and tides, that it has never been fully charted. You could take a boat and live a solitary life on any patch of land here, except for the tourist planes spotting you. You’d need to like fish, and you’d need to find a way to get fresh water, but of course, the Aborigines worked that out a long time ago.
But it is a treat to fly over, some of the most beautiful scenery we have seen anywhere in the world. It definitely figures on our top ten list. We skate across the water taking off, then rise. Before we are even in the air, the boys have their shirts off. Then we are away. Just half an hour across the archipelago, looking down at the thousand islands, rocky and sheer, poking up out of the teal blue sea. Then we fly down the coast back to Broome.
We are going to poke our noses onto the Gibb River Road, see how far we can get. Maybe closed doesn’t really mean closed, and we are still testing out our options for getting home. The weather is hot, not a cloud in the sky. Surely everything is drying out. A few km out there seems to be a wheel wobble, and we spend about 100 km trying to decide if it needs attention. We had a tyre plugged in Broome. “Will it need a wheel balance?” R asked the bloke. “Nah, she’ll be right,” he said. Broome-speak for, “It’s too hot to be bothered.”
When we get to Derby and stop at a servo, there is a tyre place attached. Most of the employees would need to be lined up to make a full set of teeth, but the owner is well dressed, well spoken. What’s his story, we wonder. Yes, it needs a wheel balance, and, by the way, have you noticed some damage to another tyre, I wouldn’t leave that on the front if I were you, not on a vehicle like this. Does that mean that blowouts are only fatal in crappy cars? “He means that ours can go fast on the highway,” explains R. It’s going to take me a lot longer to be able to interpret the abbreviated language of the outback bloke. Although they speak so slowly that you can roll it around in your head for a while trying to work it out before they move on.
But after an hour or so, for which they charge practically nothing, we are on our way and heading for Birdwood Downs, a working station 13 km along the Gibb. Sorry, get it right, up the Gibb. We pull in, looking for someone. There is a camping symbol on the map, and as free camping is no longer permitted this is where we are headed. We pull past the sheds, stop when we see someone.
A wiry, compact man in stubbies, ancient denim shirt, work-boots, stops and looks at us. His face is shiny with sweat and he has a Dutch accent. Hans, he came here a few years ago, then again, and finally arrived for good and has been here ever since. Living a solitary life, working on the station, no ties, no commitments. We are a bit early, the season hasn’t really started, but he directs us where to go, collects $25 and leaves us to it.
There is no view, but the ground is flat, the birds are singing and there are lots of shady trees. Not a sound but one little plane coming back from the trip we have just done; there is absolute peace. We shower and, cool and comfortable as the heat of the day drops, sit outside watching the sunset.
Hans has told us that everything is still closed, that someone tried to go up one of the roads a week ago and appeared back at the homestead having walked 20 km to get help for his bogged vehicle. So we think we will go and take a peek, leaving the Rocket at Birdwood Downs for another night. Just sneak along the Gibb and see what it looks like. Every dry day will make a difference, but after this wet season, it may take a long time to dry out; we’ll see. We now have several plans for our return route, but we can’t decide on any of them yet, until much closer to the day. But we laughed yesterday: “We can now say we have been up the Gibb – 13 km of it anyway.”
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Photos Broome and Cape Leveque
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| Lunch at the organic cafe |
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| Cable Beach Broome |
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| Zoe cooking birthday pancake breakfast for M |
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| On the road to Cape Leveque |
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| On the road to Cape Leveque |
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| Western headland at Cape Leveque |
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| Western headland at Cape Leveque |
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| Sunset at Cape Leveque |
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Karajini to Broome
Nice to know we haven’t lost our touch. Several days of hot fine weather was making us wonder. But no, we still can do it; it is the wettest everything on record. Except for Perth, which is in drought. We probably should take pity on them and go camping in the south, sort out their water shortage issues for them.
We arrive at Cape Leveque after abandoning a plan to do a loop along the start of the Gibb River Road because the roads are cut. Not just our back country tracks, all the roads. So let’s go instead to Cape Leveque, a celebrated beauty spot, 220 km north of Broome.
We take our chance, because it has been impossible for days now, with the area closed because of a sort-of cyclone hovering around there. Tropical low, they call it, or category 1 cyclone, it doesn’t even have a name, but I have visions of the Rocket being swept up like a farmhouse in Kansas and deposited somewhere inconvenient, like the middle of the Timor Sea. So we have waited, pottering around Broome, eyeing off the weather forecasts to try to decide which way to go to play.
So, flying along a couple of hundred km of, to our surprise, tarred road interspersed with lightly corrugated red dirt, we finish the last much rougher 13 km skating and splashing along ruts and puddles as the rain starts to pelt down again.
We are, not surprisingly, the only campers at Cape Leveque. There are pluses and minuses in everything in life, as Confucius say, and one of the good things about our habit of doing everything in unpopular weather - sweltering hot, bone-crackingly cold, or wet – is that we usually have the places to ourselves. When we did the Camino in Spain in mid-winter, we felt as if we owned the route, and here, at a place so lovely it takes your breath away and makes you exclaim out loud like someone in a B-grade movie, we are alone. A more mundane pleasure , of course, associated with this is having the ablutions block to yourself; now that is special.
We arrive, splash into the reception area, and make our way to our campsite. If the clouds ever part we are perfectly situated for a grandstand view, on a headland looking west, to catch one of the famous sunsets.
Cape Leveque is one of the more successful examples of an Aboriginal community managing its local resource. Here on a peninsula of massive red cliffs framing the western edge of the Buccaneer Archipelago the Kooljaman Resort has a variety of simple accommodation and campsites. Like most of these places resort is a pretty loose term. The scenery, not the wet bar or the invisible edge pool, both of which seem to have been overlooked in the plan, is the lure. There are beaches stretching away forever, although if you decide to swim on the Western side of the headland you will get a quick trip to Indonesia for free.
We set up camp, have a shower and then, as it has stopped raining, we head for the beach on the other side. Three minutes later we are huddled under a little roof over an information board about the lighthouse as the rain pelts down again. Somehow the idea of a swim has lost its charm and we retreat to the warm dry Rocket.
We will certainly come back to everywhere in this area at some later time when it is reliably dry, but we are extremely comfortable and love splashing through stretches of mud and slush on the tracks. Nothing is more fun than slamming the car into four wheel drive and heading into a slippery patch, checking around for winch points in the trees along the road in case it all goes horribly wrong. Of course there aren’t always winch points, sometimes there’s only savannah grass as far as the eye can see, but heck, here we are.
The Kimberleys definitely deserve more than one trip anyway; there is a lot to see and you could play around the desert tracks and the gorges a lot before you got bored. I brought “Kings in Grass Castles”, the history of the Duracks, to read while I was up here; they were a big pioneering extended family who opened up the East Kimberleys. Setting aside all of the native title issues (now that’s a big call) it is a fascinating read, and their mark is all over the map in the names of rivers, hills and even homesteads which are still there. The extraordinary courage of their feats and the hardships they endured is awe-inspiring.
But cast your mind back -first we have to get from Karajini National Park to Broome. Now this was a revelation. We just don’t like tarred roads, they are so boring by comparison. Have I mentioned this before? So we look for a way to get from Karajini to Port Hedland by those enticing little dotted lines. Point towards Marble Bar, off the tar, onto a gravel back road. Lots of these roads service mines, so parts of them are perfectly graded and almost empty. We find one that looks as if it will do. We can go and see . We can always turn around and come back if it deteriorates too much.
It is getting dark and we look for a campsite. It is so remote that we could almost just park on the road, but we look for a pull-off place. One little flat scraped spot beside the road near a river; maybe we should get something with a bit more bare ground in case of snakes. We find one and set up. As we are getting sorted R says, “Who would have thought – there’s a car coming along the road behind us.”
We look in surprise as it flies past. Then another one comes by. We are amazed. Then from the distance comes the unmistakable roar and bright lights of a road train coming towards us. We stare in astonishment as it comes closeer then thunders past. This is followed by one every half hour or so all night. It stops as we pack up just at dawn; it must be shift changeover time at some mine site along that road. So glad we didn’t park close to the edge of the road! One of those road trains might have collected us and taken us to Port Hedland without even noticing us stuck to the side of the bogey.
We set off, feeling lucky to be alive, and the day turns out to be a stunner. I hang out of the window of the car for most of the day snapping photos of the tumbled red rock scenery; hills made of piles of boulders, with ridges running north to south so that the sun perfectly highlights every line, stark black shadows in the folds, wave upon wave of them as we come over another crest. We giggle with delight at the thought of the photos, and I repeatedly call for us to stop to capture something particularly fabulous. It is only later that we find that I should have taken more notice of the message that flashed up, “formatting error”, as not one of them came out. Technology – my specialty.
Marble Bar is one of those names that conjures up thoughts of the exotic, for our generation anyway. We puzzle over it, trying to remember why; maybe it was the place where uranium was first mined? When we get there, it’s even more of a puzzle; there’s nothing exotic about it now, that’s for sure. We need fuel and there’s not a soul stirring except a couple of black teenagers sitting listlessly on the swings in a park.
We will have to get diesel here or stay the night though, so it’s a relief to find a tiny servo. The man behind the counter, a sort of united nations gathered together in one face, seems keen to chat, and we talk about our day. We rave about the scenery we have passed through. “That’s not scenery,” he says, “THAT’s scenery.” He has led us over to the wall where there is a map of the area and he is pointing at a track with lots of turns that we would definitely not have attempted just from the map; the names just sound way too remote and unpredicatble with the weather the way it is: Bamboo Creek Road, Shay Gap Road, Boreline Road.
Hang on a moment. R has just interrupted me. We are in the Rocket at Cape Leveque, the rain is tumbling steadily down, we are having a quiet Scotch before dinner and the iPod player is tossing out some great music. “You know who that is?” says R reverently, “Black Sabbath. And you know what they’re playing? Planet Caravan. “ How appropriate. We both agree that it’s fantastic to be out in the outdoors again, that we’re a bit over houses, way too many walls in them.
So we take that little dotted set of roads out of Marble Bar and it is a very memorable day. The landforms are spectacular, and it is very isolated; we don’t see another vehicle the whole day. It takes this kind of trip to really grasp what a huge country this is, where you can travel all day, several days if it is further into the red centre, and see not a soul.
Despite what the man at Marble Bar had said, we actually preferred the previous day, because the ridges had been perfectly placed for maximum effect . The two days together, though, they are must for a return visit; this was just speed dating and we would like to get to know them a whole lot better. Next time with a camera that is working.
Then we are back to tar, just north of Port Hedland and getting closer to Broome and Zoe and Warwick by the minute. We are back in phone range and Warwick keeps asking Zoe to check our progress. It’s very nice to feel that we are getting so close to seeing them. But the neat tarred road is so flat and monotonous. Past Sandfire Roadhouse and 300 km to go. R makes Dad jokes about having had a nice snooze at the wheel; the kms tick by. It’s very green, that rare season again, we are seeing something unique.
Then suddenly we are in Broome and there is Zoe, looking fantastic: blooming and beautiful. We head for her house, settle in. Warwick comes home from work and we start a few days of enjoying each other’s company, eating out, looking around Broome.
We go to the outdoor cinema, with the rustle of the palm trees as a background to the story. We have lunch at an organic cafe with a schoolfriend of Zoe’s who lives here with her husband. We breakfast at Town Beach, and have dinners at a Japanese fusion restaurant and a brewery. Broome grows on us; it is neat and pretty and different. When it was rebuilt after a cyclone it was done with sensitivity and a nod to the history. Zoe and Warwick, of course, see the other side of Broome, the challenges, and it makes for interesting conversation about the light and shade.
Then it is time for Warwick to fly to the UK. We wave him off at the airport then head north to Cape Leveque for a couple of days. Here we are, music on the iPod, the sound of the staff here laughing and playing guitars at the bunkhouse nearby, steak on the frying pan. Not bad.
We arrive at Cape Leveque after abandoning a plan to do a loop along the start of the Gibb River Road because the roads are cut. Not just our back country tracks, all the roads. So let’s go instead to Cape Leveque, a celebrated beauty spot, 220 km north of Broome.
We take our chance, because it has been impossible for days now, with the area closed because of a sort-of cyclone hovering around there. Tropical low, they call it, or category 1 cyclone, it doesn’t even have a name, but I have visions of the Rocket being swept up like a farmhouse in Kansas and deposited somewhere inconvenient, like the middle of the Timor Sea. So we have waited, pottering around Broome, eyeing off the weather forecasts to try to decide which way to go to play.
So, flying along a couple of hundred km of, to our surprise, tarred road interspersed with lightly corrugated red dirt, we finish the last much rougher 13 km skating and splashing along ruts and puddles as the rain starts to pelt down again.
We are, not surprisingly, the only campers at Cape Leveque. There are pluses and minuses in everything in life, as Confucius say, and one of the good things about our habit of doing everything in unpopular weather - sweltering hot, bone-crackingly cold, or wet – is that we usually have the places to ourselves. When we did the Camino in Spain in mid-winter, we felt as if we owned the route, and here, at a place so lovely it takes your breath away and makes you exclaim out loud like someone in a B-grade movie, we are alone. A more mundane pleasure , of course, associated with this is having the ablutions block to yourself; now that is special.
We arrive, splash into the reception area, and make our way to our campsite. If the clouds ever part we are perfectly situated for a grandstand view, on a headland looking west, to catch one of the famous sunsets.
Cape Leveque is one of the more successful examples of an Aboriginal community managing its local resource. Here on a peninsula of massive red cliffs framing the western edge of the Buccaneer Archipelago the Kooljaman Resort has a variety of simple accommodation and campsites. Like most of these places resort is a pretty loose term. The scenery, not the wet bar or the invisible edge pool, both of which seem to have been overlooked in the plan, is the lure. There are beaches stretching away forever, although if you decide to swim on the Western side of the headland you will get a quick trip to Indonesia for free.
We set up camp, have a shower and then, as it has stopped raining, we head for the beach on the other side. Three minutes later we are huddled under a little roof over an information board about the lighthouse as the rain pelts down again. Somehow the idea of a swim has lost its charm and we retreat to the warm dry Rocket.
We will certainly come back to everywhere in this area at some later time when it is reliably dry, but we are extremely comfortable and love splashing through stretches of mud and slush on the tracks. Nothing is more fun than slamming the car into four wheel drive and heading into a slippery patch, checking around for winch points in the trees along the road in case it all goes horribly wrong. Of course there aren’t always winch points, sometimes there’s only savannah grass as far as the eye can see, but heck, here we are.
The Kimberleys definitely deserve more than one trip anyway; there is a lot to see and you could play around the desert tracks and the gorges a lot before you got bored. I brought “Kings in Grass Castles”, the history of the Duracks, to read while I was up here; they were a big pioneering extended family who opened up the East Kimberleys. Setting aside all of the native title issues (now that’s a big call) it is a fascinating read, and their mark is all over the map in the names of rivers, hills and even homesteads which are still there. The extraordinary courage of their feats and the hardships they endured is awe-inspiring.
But cast your mind back -first we have to get from Karajini National Park to Broome. Now this was a revelation. We just don’t like tarred roads, they are so boring by comparison. Have I mentioned this before? So we look for a way to get from Karajini to Port Hedland by those enticing little dotted lines. Point towards Marble Bar, off the tar, onto a gravel back road. Lots of these roads service mines, so parts of them are perfectly graded and almost empty. We find one that looks as if it will do. We can go and see . We can always turn around and come back if it deteriorates too much.
It is getting dark and we look for a campsite. It is so remote that we could almost just park on the road, but we look for a pull-off place. One little flat scraped spot beside the road near a river; maybe we should get something with a bit more bare ground in case of snakes. We find one and set up. As we are getting sorted R says, “Who would have thought – there’s a car coming along the road behind us.”
We look in surprise as it flies past. Then another one comes by. We are amazed. Then from the distance comes the unmistakable roar and bright lights of a road train coming towards us. We stare in astonishment as it comes closeer then thunders past. This is followed by one every half hour or so all night. It stops as we pack up just at dawn; it must be shift changeover time at some mine site along that road. So glad we didn’t park close to the edge of the road! One of those road trains might have collected us and taken us to Port Hedland without even noticing us stuck to the side of the bogey.
We set off, feeling lucky to be alive, and the day turns out to be a stunner. I hang out of the window of the car for most of the day snapping photos of the tumbled red rock scenery; hills made of piles of boulders, with ridges running north to south so that the sun perfectly highlights every line, stark black shadows in the folds, wave upon wave of them as we come over another crest. We giggle with delight at the thought of the photos, and I repeatedly call for us to stop to capture something particularly fabulous. It is only later that we find that I should have taken more notice of the message that flashed up, “formatting error”, as not one of them came out. Technology – my specialty.
Marble Bar is one of those names that conjures up thoughts of the exotic, for our generation anyway. We puzzle over it, trying to remember why; maybe it was the place where uranium was first mined? When we get there, it’s even more of a puzzle; there’s nothing exotic about it now, that’s for sure. We need fuel and there’s not a soul stirring except a couple of black teenagers sitting listlessly on the swings in a park.
We will have to get diesel here or stay the night though, so it’s a relief to find a tiny servo. The man behind the counter, a sort of united nations gathered together in one face, seems keen to chat, and we talk about our day. We rave about the scenery we have passed through. “That’s not scenery,” he says, “THAT’s scenery.” He has led us over to the wall where there is a map of the area and he is pointing at a track with lots of turns that we would definitely not have attempted just from the map; the names just sound way too remote and unpredicatble with the weather the way it is: Bamboo Creek Road, Shay Gap Road, Boreline Road.
Hang on a moment. R has just interrupted me. We are in the Rocket at Cape Leveque, the rain is tumbling steadily down, we are having a quiet Scotch before dinner and the iPod player is tossing out some great music. “You know who that is?” says R reverently, “Black Sabbath. And you know what they’re playing? Planet Caravan. “ How appropriate. We both agree that it’s fantastic to be out in the outdoors again, that we’re a bit over houses, way too many walls in them.
So we take that little dotted set of roads out of Marble Bar and it is a very memorable day. The landforms are spectacular, and it is very isolated; we don’t see another vehicle the whole day. It takes this kind of trip to really grasp what a huge country this is, where you can travel all day, several days if it is further into the red centre, and see not a soul.
Despite what the man at Marble Bar had said, we actually preferred the previous day, because the ridges had been perfectly placed for maximum effect . The two days together, though, they are must for a return visit; this was just speed dating and we would like to get to know them a whole lot better. Next time with a camera that is working.
Then we are back to tar, just north of Port Hedland and getting closer to Broome and Zoe and Warwick by the minute. We are back in phone range and Warwick keeps asking Zoe to check our progress. It’s very nice to feel that we are getting so close to seeing them. But the neat tarred road is so flat and monotonous. Past Sandfire Roadhouse and 300 km to go. R makes Dad jokes about having had a nice snooze at the wheel; the kms tick by. It’s very green, that rare season again, we are seeing something unique.
Then suddenly we are in Broome and there is Zoe, looking fantastic: blooming and beautiful. We head for her house, settle in. Warwick comes home from work and we start a few days of enjoying each other’s company, eating out, looking around Broome.
We go to the outdoor cinema, with the rustle of the palm trees as a background to the story. We have lunch at an organic cafe with a schoolfriend of Zoe’s who lives here with her husband. We breakfast at Town Beach, and have dinners at a Japanese fusion restaurant and a brewery. Broome grows on us; it is neat and pretty and different. When it was rebuilt after a cyclone it was done with sensitivity and a nod to the history. Zoe and Warwick, of course, see the other side of Broome, the challenges, and it makes for interesting conversation about the light and shade.
Then it is time for Warwick to fly to the UK. We wave him off at the airport then head north to Cape Leveque for a couple of days. Here we are, music on the iPod, the sound of the staff here laughing and playing guitars at the bunkhouse nearby, steak on the frying pan. Not bad.
Photos Poonda Rock Art to Karjini
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