The start of our trip corresponded with the new moon. I was keen to take advantage of the dark sky. At Larrawa I found a nice spinifex foreground. The following night we stayed at the Leycester rest area and I found a few skinny young Boabs not far away. Some bonus lighting was provided by a passing car.
Leycester rest area is a 24 hour free camp with toilets, a dump point and rubbish disposal. It’s adjacent to a very beautiful spot on the Ord river and it’s only a hop skip away from the Bungle Bungles turn off. Given all of that and the time of the year it’s no surprise that it was packed. The river bank sites are the first to go.
Larrawa Station is 146km east of Fitzroy Crossing. The camp ground is 4km off the Great Northern Highway. We were there early and chose our spot. Is was pretty full by the end of the day, a basic but very pleasant site.
A walk of about one and a half kilometres brings you to Christmas Creek. Boabs and cattle are the highlights along the way. The first creek bed was dry, the second one contained a nice billabong. Both channels would be running a banker at Christmas given that our southern Christmas is a summer event and summer is the wet season up here. Come in winter.
The billabong was the place to find the birds.
Brown HoneyeaterPainted FinchPainted FinchSacred Kingfisher
First night was at Fitzroy Crossing. It has a nice new bridge, speedily built after its predecessor was destroyed by flood in the big wet of 2022/23. It also has a bad reputation for hostile natives, stones thrown at vehicles and theft from vans and cars. The Fitzroy River Lodge is a very lovely caravan park on the banks of the river. We enjoyed our stay, experienced no hostility whatsoever and wouldn’t hesitate to stay there again.
Safely home in Broome after an anticlockwise circuit of the beautiful Kimberley. We caught up with good friends and our little caravan survived the notorious Gibb River Road but not entirely unscathed.
With additional running around we traveled 2400km, saw 116 species of birds and took a few thousand photographs.
The Kimberley Craton is one of the oldest chunks of Australia. It collided (very slowly) with the Northern Australia Craton during the Paleoproterozoic era, 2.5–1.6 billion years ago. Sedimentary basin formation and time then conspired to produce the sandstone gorges and rocky ranges that make this area one of the most visually splendid in all of Oz.
And Boabs. There may be photos of Boabs (when I catch up with the editing).
When I write about interesting places and I’m diligent in getting the posts up regularly my readership grows. If you’re new to these pages welcome, to my regulars welcome back. In either case thank you for coming.
I live in Broome. Top left hand side of the map of Oz. Many non Australians think that Australia is permanently hot and sunny. Broome is exactly that. Except when it’s pouring with rain. That happens in our summer … Occasionally.
About 15,000 people live here and we get plenty of visitors in winter because the truth is that Australia’s climate in more southerly regions is not warm and sunny all year round. Our tourists have barely thawed out by the time they get off the plane. We are about 10 days past the winter solstice. Today’s forecast maximum is 31°C (88°F) tonight’s minimum 16°C (60°F). It’s not going to rain.
There is just one road from Broome to the rest of Australia. About 35 km out it branches. Turn right for Perth, straight on for Darwin. Turn right and you’re heading south, the next town is Port Hedland, similar population, 610 km! Two road houses in between, negligible population. If you go straight on i.e. north-east you won’t get to a town as large as little old Broome until you get to Darwin, 1,871 km away. In between there are a few little towns that would struggle to qualify as hamlets elsewhere.
Why so few people? Because the country up here is permanently hot and sunny. Except when it’s pouring with rain. That happens in our summer … Occasionally. It’s a desert. Annual rainfall less than 250mm. Annual evaporation would be 3 to 4 meters if there were 3 to 4 meters available!
There are apparently ten deserts in Australia although I am unsure how they decide where one ends and another starts. The local desert is the Great Sandy Desert, a testament to the imagination of our forefathers (and yes, there is a Little Sandy Desert, you’ll recognise it when you see it. It’s only half the size. Also a Stony Desert). The Great Sandy (267,250sq.km) is our second largest (to the Great Victoria at 348,750sq.km).
About 200 km from home via a very lonely sandy track there is a gorge that I have been meaning to visit. I went out there for a couple of nights last week, camped alone, in the spinifex, under the stars on the lip of the canyon. Very biblical, only 38 more nights to go. Can they be served cumulatively or do they have to be accrued in one go?
WallerooSpinifex Pigeon
Broome is the administrative capital of the Kimberley region (which is northeast of here before you get to Darwin). In my view it ain’t really the Kimberly until you get among the Boab trees (not just street plantings, real Boabs). Anyway, that’s where I’m going. If I get the chance to post along the way I might drop in a teaser otherwise I’ll subject you all to the photos when I get back in a couple of weeks. Ciao for now.
It’s time to wind up the account of my trip to Botswana and Zimbabwe, say thanks to Pete Oxford and Renee Bish, the organisers and leaders, and say farewell and thanks to my traveling companions. It was indeed a pleasure to meet you all. I hope to travel with you all again one day.
The African Queen, what a classic, was shot on the Nile in Uganda and the Congo. I’ve been on both rivers but never felt more like Charlie Allnut than on the Zambezi in a boat like this …
photo Gayle McGee
The Zambezi is the fourth longest river in Africa draining slightly less than half the area that the Nile draws from. Its source is in Zambia, it flows through Angola, is the boundary of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe before traversing Mozambique to the Indian Ocean. Its most notable feature is the spectacular Victoria Falls. The Kariba dam is a major hydro plant providing electricity to Zambia and Zimbabwe. Frequent rapids prevent it being a major transport route.
It was a very pleasant afternoon cruise. Even more enjoyable because our skipper was into the birds. He made a point of finding us Finfoot and White-crowned Lapwing, two of the local specialities.
Nile CrocodileNile CrocodileWhite-crowned LapwingWhite-fronted Bee-eaterBrown-hooded KingfisherWhite-backed VultureLong-tailed CormorantAfrican Finfoot
We flew from Chitabe Lediba to Kasane in the far north-east of Botswana, transferred to a small bus and headed for the border. Our destination was the magnificent old colonial style Victoria Falls Hotel.
At breakfast the next morning we got our first glimpse of Vic Falls, or at least the spray …
That’s not cloud, it’s not smoke, it’s airborne water that supports a little rain forest in what is an otherwise quite arid landscape.
I first visited the Falls in 2014. You can read all about it <HERE> and <HERE> and, of course, there are some photos. The price of admission has gone up. The standard of living of the locals hasn’t. Plenty of water was going over the falls. The assertion that they were easier to photograph when the flow was less proved true. A few of the birds posed nicely.
On the day that God made the Warthog there was a shortage of skin. As a result the body of the Warthog is a very tight fit. When it runs through the grass it closes its eyes to keep the seeds out. So tight is its skin that just closing its eyes is enough to make its tail stand up.
photo Gayle McGee
There are other tales to explain why it feeds on its knees and why its hair is so patchy. It seems to be a popular figure in African folklore.
One of our local driver/guides found us a large owl, Verreaux’s Eagle-Owl. He recalled that as a child the call of the owl would strike fear in his heart and send him running home. To his family the owl was a bad omen. For other African people it was the wise owl or even the nocturnal protector of the village.
In the fairy tales I grew up with the owl was wise but in European folklore it has also figured as the harbinger of death, an associate of witches or the protector of barns from lightning although to fulfill that duty it first had to be nailed to the barn door.
The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch ((c. 1450 – 1516) depicted owls in many of his works. He was either a deeply religious man seeking to demonstrate the dreadfulness of sin (the orthodox view) or someone who’d found a neat loophole in the censorship laws. He may have seen owls as wise in that knowing too much, cynical sort of way, having eaten from the tree of knowledge etc or he just had a fetish. A detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights …
Verreaux of the Eagle-Owl and also the Eagle, Coua and Sifaca (and also celebrated in the scientific names of a dove, a parrotbill, a skink, a gecko and an eel) is Jules Pierre Verreaux (1807 – 1873) a French botanist, ornithologist and professional collector and trader in natural history specimens. He earns a mention in the Biographical Notes of the Australian National Herbarium for his plant collecting activities in New South Wales and Tasmania. They don’t go into much detail about his exploits in Africa.
Whilst in Botswana in 1830 Verreaux observed the burial of a Tswana Warrior. He returned that night , dug up the corpse, took the skin, skull and a few other bones, crated it all up with a few other specimens and sent them off to Paris. I wonder if the owl was part of the same shipment.
bobmcgee 