Australia – Page 12

One More River …

Kununurra to Manbulloo Homestead – 481km.

It was the Croc Motel in Kununurra that was pet friendly. It was also clean and comfortable although there was a faint aroma of damp. The units are arranged around a courtyard where someone is doing much better with their Heliconias and ferns than I am in Broome.

Given that today would be somewhat shorter we took time to go birding in the Celebrity Tree Park on the banks of Lake Kununurra. Very enjoyable. Best bird goes to Comb-crested Jacana with Tawny Frogmouth a close second.

Then onward ever onward. Still Highway 1 but now called the Victoria Highway. That part of the Great Northern that we traversed yesterday and the Victorian together form part of the Savannah Way – I think we are overdoing the names here. But, anyway a new day, a new state, a new time zone and a new speed limit. Northern Territory, clocks forward one and a half hours (yes, Central Australian time is a bit weird. I haven’t encountered anything but whole hour shifts any where else.) and the beast could now be unleashed at 130kph (80mph) if you dared on a narrow, wet, flood affected surface.

The rain began around lunch time and continued on and off for the rest of the day. There were waterfalls coming off the escarpments in fairly spectacular fashion and the rivers were up. Plenty of water about.

Two important rivers are behind us now, the Fitzroy on day one and the Victoria today. In recent years both of these have flooded causing delays that lasted weeks. It’s good to have seen them in the rear view mirror.

Manbulloo Homestead is on the Katherine River and the birding is good. Tomorrow is a big day, long way to go, so there will be little time to enjoy it here. Must come back.

All is set for a classic day three tomorrow.

Road Trip …

Day 1 – Broome to Kununurra, 1,050km (656 miles) via Highway 1 aka the Great Northern in this neck of the woods. Destination Broome (eventually) via every mainland state. The big loop. Starting in the hottest month of the year and in the wet to boot. Is this madness or is there a motive?

There is a motive. We have bought a new caravan. We have an appointment to pick it up in Caloundra, Queensland 10am January 28. That’s a mere 4,721km via the northern route. Add another 1000km to take the southern route via the Nullarbor. There is no middle way – the Buddha would be disappointed. Either way can be closed by floods and both were open this morning. The whole of the continent seems to be wet and wild at the moment. We are leaving behind an intense low pressure system that may well be the west coast’s first cyclone this year. A flood alert is in force.

We are two days behind schedule because some electrical work on the car couldn’t be completed in the time allowed for it. Our itinerary has some redundancy built in we may still make our appointment.

Until we pick up the van we are a man, a woman and a small dog in a tent. Tonight though we are cheating. The rain has been bucketing down this afternoon and we have been able to find a pet friendly motel. That won’t always be possible. My crystal ball sees a few soggy nights in our future.

A New Year …

I do wish you a happy and trouble free 2025.

Bird watchers around the globe have been out chasing a big day to get their year list off to a good start. Me too. I was introduced to a competition of sorts by birders on Townsville Common. It’s simple. Your list has to be bigger than the number of days elapsed in the year. Easy at first, it gets tougher as you get deeper in the year. When you fall behind you’re out. I call it the Calendar Game and play just against myself. I have lost every year since the Big Panic changed my travel habits.

So on the first of the new year I got ahead of January and February. I have a road trip coming up so the list should move along well for a while.

While having a look at Broome’s Entrance Point a couple pulled up near me and asked, had I seen it? Not only had I not seen it, I didn’t know what it was. They’d found it on the oval in town and alerted the bird watching community. I was the last birdo in town to reach the oval … not long after it had gone. The alert had come through on my watch, which was at home charging.

It was a gull. It had been very happy to hang out with other gulls especially around anybody who looked like they had food. Next stop all the other places that I knew gulls congregated starting with Town Beach …

Americans will be wondering why the fuss? A Laughing Gull, so what?

It’s the first record for WA and new for my Australia list. Thank you Clare and Grant.

Darwin …

Not Charles, the city, although it does have a Charles Darwin University and a Charles Darwin National Park. The latter serves mainly for the conservation of biting insects. Avoid Sandfly Point at all costs. I’m en route to Singapore where I hope to walk the Wallace trail in one of their fine parks.

I had time enough to do a little birding. One highlight was an Azure Kingfisher near Buffalo Creek another was the Chestnut Rail. The dip of the day was the Laughing Gull recently seen at Mindil Beach. I wonder where it is now.

I will post the odd snippet as I go. If I get any good photos I will elaborate on my return.

Windjana Gorge …

I took the chance to spend a couple of nights at Windjana Gorge. This is accessible from Broome via the sealed section of the Gibb River Road and the shockingly bad unsealed Fairfield-Leopold Downs Road. I left the caravan at home rather than shake anything else loose from it and took the trusty AusTent.

The Kimberley is famous for its many, very beautiful sandstone gorges but this one is limestone. During the Devonian, that’s 419 MYA (million years ago) to 350 MYA plus or minus a few minutes at each end, this area was beneath a shallow sea. Lime secreting organisms were busily creating a reef that we now see as the Napier Range. The Fitzroy River has cut through the range giving us Geike Gorge, Windjana is the work of the Lennard River and Barker Gorge owes its existence to the Barker River.

Windjana is in a National Park. There is a campground with flush toilets and showers. No drinking water is provided. It’s a top spot for Freshwater Crocodiles and Agile Wallabies. If you are really lucky you may see a Short-eared Rock-Wallaby. The scenery is spectacular. The bird watching is great.

On previous visits the Freshies were basking out of the water. On this occasion they were harder to find. This may be a seasonal variation. Spot lighting at night soon confirmed that there were plenty there. Early in the morning I found one lying at the water’s edge.

My visit was timed to be close to New Moon. There was a bit of cloud the first night but the second night was clear …

On the way home I put a rock through the sidewall of a tyre. I put on a hat, had a drink of water and set about finding the requisite apparatus. I was about to let down the spare from under the ute tray when a road train pulled up. How was I going? Clearly I had had better moments but in life’s rich tapestry this was no tragedy. The only available Australian answer to the question is Good Thanks. A second road train pulled up. The discussion group had expanded to three, but the first truck driver was now winding down the spare, the second driver asked me to make sure the hand brake was on. By the time I’d done that he was undoing the wheel nuts.

Then the third road train pulled up. The discussion group was now four men and a dog. Me and the dog were the only ones not working. Truck driver number one was jacking the vehicle up, number two had the wheel off the moment it cleared the ground, number three put the new wheel on, number two tightened the nuts, number one let the vehicle down and then wound the injured wheel up under the tray. QED.

Thank you, guys, thank you. Outback truckies are the salt of the earth.

Gantheaume Point …

… is a popular place to watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean. Yesterday was unusually cloudy. A crowd had gathered at Gantheaume Point but it was clear that the spectacle was not going to be up to its usual standard. The sun was visible with fifteen minutes to go but it sank into cloud before it reached the horizon. And the crowd melted away.

Four people and a dog stuck it out to see if the sky would catch. We were rewarded about 25 minutes after sunset.

The Point was named by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin (whose own name is appended to one of our cockatoos) in honour of Honoré Joseph Antoine Ganteaume, a notable French admiral and friend of Napolean.

Making the Most …

Home again, home again, jiggity jig. Just have to make the most of the mundane.

Completing the Loop …

Kimberley 24.X

After saying farewell to our friends at Ellenbrae it was back onto the Gibb. About 40km west of Ellenbrae the road improved but there were occasional relapses to bone jarring corrugations. A night at the Manning Gorge campground then two nights at Birdwood Station brought us close to Derby.

As well as having a poke around Derby we bought screws at the well equipped Mitre 10. We needed to replace quite a few in the van! We were home in time for lunch the following day.

This was not our first rodeo on the Gibb River Road. We could have crammed in a bit more but now that we live in fairly easy reach we think it better to spend a few days at a time in chosen areas rather than be traveling significant distances every day.

If you are reading this with a view to planning your own trip consider including Tunnel Creek, Windjana Gorge, Lennard River Gorge, Mount Elizabeth Station, Drysdale Station, Mitchell Plateau and Falls. The landscape at the Home Valley bush camp is a must for the photographer. If completing the loop then Purnululu AKA the Bungle Bungles is not to be missed on the Northern Highway leg. We took our dog which ruled out the Mitchell Plateau and Purnululu. You can’t take a caravan up to the Purnululu campground and it is probably wiser not to drag one up to Mitchell Falls. Swags or tents for a couple of nights at a time will make the adventure all the more exciting.

There are other places that we haven’t got around to visiting yet, famous among them being Mount Hart and El Questro.

Passes and permits are needed for some areas and should be purchased in advance.

Mechanical failure on the Gibb is likely to be very expensive. Tyre and mechanical assistance is available at Over the Range Tyre & Mechanical Repairs and to some limited extent at Ellenbrae. Getting hauled out would be expensive and might entail some delay. An extra spare wheel is a sound investment. There is any amount of contradictory advice on what tyre pressures to run. It may be of benefit to drop to 20 to 30% below highway pressures (eg Highway pressure 42 X 0.75 = 31psi). It is certainly smart to drive at moderate speed and avoid the obvious rocks.

We had a compressor mounted on the van when we started our journey across the Gibb. It had fallen off by the end of the first day. If you come across it we’d like it back!

Boabs …

Kimberley 24.9

Elsewhere in the world you will find Iguanas, Opossums and Baobabs. In Oz we have Goannas, Possums and Boabs. Australians have been very negligent with words borrowed from other languages. If I were you I wouldn’t lend us anything. Especially if you’re French. We absolutely murder anything French.

The genus is Adansonia. There are eight species. Six are endemic to Madagascar where the genus almost certainly evolved. There is another species in Africa and last but not least is Adansonia gregorii found in north-west Australia. They are very long lived deciduous trees that grow in seasonally arid parts of the world. There are Adansonias alive today that were old when Christ was born.

The seeds, leaves and pith from the fruit (tastes like sherbet not chicken) are allegedly edible and rich in vitamin C.

The Boab flowers overnight, not the greatest strategy for bird and bee pollination. So it may be down to moths and bats. Success results in a pod with many seeds. Indeed Wikipedia tells us Baobab is from the Arabic أَبُو حِبَاب (abū ḥibāb) meaning many-seeded fruit. The fruit pod floats in water and will germinate successfully even after immersion in the sea.

If they started out in Madagascar how did they get to Australia? We can rule out a Gondwanan explanation. The genus has features that suggest it is too modern to have emerged when Africa and Australia were part of one large landmass. Too young for that but too old to have been brought here by the aboriginal settlers. Genetic divergence has been happening for some millions of years rather than the roughly 70,000 years since people arrived. Which leaves a sea borne introduction as the most likely hypothesis. Aboriginal people have certainly helped its dispersal since their arrival.

The Yawaru people of Broome have a traditional craft of carving designs in pearl shell. Some have transferred the art to carving Boab fruit. You can buy them in the market hot off the knife. I bought one 20 plus years ago. They last quite well …

You can see a fish on one side, a turtle on the reverse, traditional motifs for salt water people. The designs are encircled by a Rainbow Serpent.

Ellenbrae …

Kimberley 24.8

Ellenbrae Station is an incredible one million acres.

It does a roaring trade in tyres, scones and jam (with cream) and mango frappés. There are two camp sites. One is close to a billabong, the other slightly further away and just a bit quieter as a consequence. You may luxuriate in a bath or take a hike to the very picturesque Sandy Beach Gorge.

We spent four nights here made all the more pleasant by catching up with friends. We did a bit of birding, ate a few scones and we also headed out to mess about in boats on the Durack River. A top spot.