exploring the gibb river road and the bungle bungles in our fancy 4WD

a frustratingly dry storm in the notorius "build up"
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Having sold the car and picked up our bargain-ish Nissan Patrol we headed for proper outback in the heat of Northern WA.

Our first tourist attraction was the Gibb River Road, usually mentioned in guide books as one of the bumpiest, rattliest roads in Oz, but it wasn't all that bad really.  We only drove about half way along though, before turning round and heading back south and then east to the Bungle Bungles.

read books and tried to work out if quacks echoed

sweet relief at bells gorge on the gibb river road
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Our first night was spent at one of the free campsites you find in these parts at a place called Telegraph Pool.  You can tell when you are somewhere pretty remote when the area is named after a single, old telegraph pole.  Was a great place to stop, really good views of an estuary full of pelicans and crocodiles (or were those just large logs?)  However, we had already decided that the ground here was too hot for camping, so we slept up on the roofrack of the car.

We remained living there for the next week.  It was simply a matter of finding somewhere to park under a tree to hang the mosquito net down from, then rolling out the sleeping mats.  Actually pretty comfortable, and being that high of the ground does make all the difference when it had been 40ºC or more in the shade, every day...

our new sleeping arrangements. I call it a mobile safari tent.
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Our first stop on the Gibb River Road was Bell Gorge, a bumpy 30km detour from the main road.  Well worth the trip though, after a 10 minute walk we were at the top of a waterfall, where we gladly splashed around to cool ourselves down.  There was then a path to follow down to the base of the falls where you could jump in and follow the river down a little way along the gorge, a couple of small waterfalls to topple over before the journey stopped at one that was about 10m high.  Saw a couple of big monitor lizardy things down there, and lots of frogs.

a harmless freshie at windjana gorge.
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Put our mosquito net up at another free campsite back near the main road, but after dinner we both got spooked by a really hot wind, a red horizon (it was 2 hours after sunset though) and a smell of burning.  Alex being a big Neighbour's fan thought that the bush was on fire, so we relocated about 20kms (to the other side of the fresh tarmac which had been laid down on a short stretch of road....) where things were a lot less worrying.

A couple more gorges later and we went to one of the Gibb River Road's big attractions; Tunnel Creek.  There is about 800 metres of tunnel that during most of the year you have to wade through, but this being the end of the dry season meant that the river was very shallow.  We did get our ankles wet, and saw some freshwater crocodiles a few metres away (luckily they're the ones that don't want to eat you) and some big squabbling bats.  The water in Tunnel Creek is quite off-puttingly dark by torchlight, and if you are barefooted you can feel all sorts of squealchy things down there, so it is not a 100% pleasant experience, still we didn't tread on any crocs.

tunnel creek. teeming with bats and the odd freshie in the dark waters.
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After another hot night on the car in the delightful outback town of Fitzroy Crossing we headed into the Bungle Bungles (just 700kms from the last proper tourist attraction at Tunnel Creek).  The Purnulu National Park as it is properly known was only 'discovered' in 1983 although the cattle ranchers that lived there, and the aborigines before them obviously knew about it.  The park is pretty hard to access, firstly being in a remote corner of a remote state (we were over 1000kms from 'The Most Remote Bead Shop in the World') and then it is another 90 minutes on a 4wd track to the park entrance.  Although in reality a 2wd car could make it in apparently the park wardens will just send you back unless your car has the magic 4x4 sticker on the back...

bush fire risk: extremely high
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We had a couple of nights (on the roof again of course) in the park and did most of the walks.  We were probably at our hottest here in the Bungles because there were no nice pools to cool off in, very sticky.  Only a relatively small part of the National Park is classic Bungle Bungle beehives (the highest ones are about 200metres high to give you some scale to the pictures) but the rest of the park was enjoyable too, particularly Echidna Chasm which was really cool in the bottom, so we stayed there and read books and tried to work out if quacks echoed for a couple of hours (they didn't echo for that long).

some bungles
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The final part of our Bungles stay was Alex's much anticipated helicopter ride over the park.  We had booked a 30 minute ride in one of the no-doored helicopters.  Quite exciting stuff, and the ride gave us a really good appreciation of how big and isolated some parts of the park were.