And at last - the Bungle Bungles!

Friday, Kununurra and the Bungle Bungles!!

I finally saw and totally lost my heart to the Bungle Bungles at 7 am today, in the co-pilot seat of Alligator Airways’ Gypslander Airvan VH-WOG, bush pilot Kate Stewart making an elegant job of flying and guiding.....

But first back to yesterday which I spent in a heat daze (38 degrees and high humidity), switching between swimming pool, washing clothes and trying to get up to date on epost and blog in air-conditioned room, several frustrating attempts to load up photos on blogs, but local wifi and this laptop playing wargames with each other... Confirmed the scenic flight over the Bungles for 5.30 this morning and finally after sundown wandered around a little, enveloped in the warm tropical evening air and the scent of frangipani, stopped at the first take-away and ordered a Barraburger with a small side-order of chips/French fries/pommes frite/callemwotuwill. Total confusion when the small order turned out big enough to fill a wheelbarrow and no wheelbarrows available for rent..... The burger was good though – barramundi is a really sweet-tasting whitefish, lovely grilled, as it was in the burger.

Back to Backpackers’, past groups of local aborigines sitting under the trees, a group totally separate from the whites hurrying by in their SUVs to the Bottle Shop & supermarket, no aggro anywhere, but again this strange and disturbing feeling of a schizophrenic society, a disoriented indigenous and an affluent “European” population not sure what to do about things. It’s only recently that official Australia has started to say “Sorry” (although the right wing, like the Norwegian so-called “Progressive Party” and the UK BNP would probably just say “Get rid of’em!”) But unlike Fortress Europe, terrified of being drowned in a wave of immigrants, here it’s the whites who are the aggressive invaders, for many years killing, destroying, ignoring a 40,000 to 70,000 year established culture......

Sat around the pool for a while in Backpackers’, a truly cosmopolitan group, though me feeling very much the old and odd one out.... then just before 10 pm, the first wind gusts, suddenly developing into a full-blown electrical storm – violent gusts of wind bringing down palm branches (and whole trees different places in town). Power-out and real rain – my tropical “walls of water” as I used to call them in Timor, were suddenly coming sideways as the lightning and thunder made a tremendous “son et lumière” show.... Glad I had a hotel room and not just the campervan as the rain hammered down on the corrugated iron roof and my resident room gecko chirped happily at all the humidity..... By 2 am I’d despaired of a morning flight to the Bungles, but of course by 4 am all was peaceful and by 5.30 it was yet another clear and warm tropical morning. The pick-up driver did say though that the storm had been unusually violent, especially in this “build-up to the wet” – they’d not seen anything like this for 2 years – normally there’s just lots of rain and that’s it.... (Several other locals I talked to today thought it had been great and very entertaining for the whole family - not just your normal boring rainstorm, a real show....)

Then the fantastic flight south to the Bungle Bungles and back – first an orientation and then out to the planes – me and 5 others being under the care of Kate Stewart, a young and lovely Kiwi “who just keeps coming back here to fly around the outback”. I get chosen to sit in the co-pilot seat and off we go, Kate holding her door half-open to cool us down a little as we taxi – it’s now 6 am and getting warm again...... Take off and then South over the Ord River Irrigation Area, relying on water from the artificial Lake Argyll (“the biggest manmade lake in Australia”) . All very interesting, but worrying – here they’ve irrigated vast areas, using large-scale mechanized farming, but (like other areas in Ozz?) don’t seem to have found the right way to do it – cotton failed, sugar failed, now they’re trying sandalwood and tropical fruits..... All very anathema to this very small-scale organic farmer and veggie-grower...

Then over wild cattleland and fascinating geology and on to the Bungle Bungles themselves – beehives, pinnacles, gorges and canyons, all of flatlying (Devonian, 340 million years old) red and yellow striped sandstones, all glowing in the early morning sun, even more spectacular as uncontrollable bushfires raged over much of the area... Beautiful, mysterious, almost impenetrable on the ground, only “discovered” by Europeans in the 1980s, beloved of and sacred to the locals, many songlines going through here.... Words and my poor pictures just can’t describe it – check it out on the web, simply awesome!

Then back north flying over a major faultline marking the pushing together of the southern Gondwanan supercontinent a long, long time ago – and over one of the major assaults on the area's landscape – the Argyll Mine – probably the largest diamond mine in the world, famous for its pink diamonds, no further comment....

Back to Kununurra and the world, planning the next part of the trip – with the wet starting early like this I need places to stay at night, the campervan is just not good enough. Ever onwards tomorrow! Not sure when I can manage to download some photos though, maybe not before Broome next week..... Just follow my texts from place to place......