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.”
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