Broome, here we go again, Sunday 1.11

Broome, 17 57 S, 122 14 E, 0000 km (nulled out the distance!)

I drove the trusty Wicked camper into the parking lot at Broome airport on Thursday evening to collect Ros coming from Perth, decided to park somewhere else, turned the key to start, and no response apart from a faint click. After 4,500 km without any problems it would go no further. We took a taxi back to the Backpackers' and spent Friday morning waiting for help, Ros taking picture of me and camper. When help finally came and started her up, diagnosis was dead battery - "Take her in without stopping again!" Which we duly did and exchanged her for a little Suzuki 4WD jeep which Ros has been driving happily ever since, both of us living life "Broometime", relaxing in the tropical heat

Nice little place Broome, population 15,000 and up to twice as many tourists in the busy Australian winter from June to September, but now it's quiet (and very hot and sticky) as the build-up to the wet continues. We've done most of the sites - the dinosaur footprints, the crocodile farm, Chinatown, the history of pearling here, the cemetries of the Japanese and Chinese pearl divers - we even took a long scenic flight northwestwards yesterday to the "Horizontal waterfalls" (with a 10-12 m tidal difference, giant surges gush through narrow inlets) , seeing the endless beaches and mangroves of the (largely deserted) desert islands of the Buccaneer archipelago and swimming from paradise spot Cape Leveque - a spectacular and very bumpy flight in a tiny Cessna 210, piloted by Jeremy, who didn't look old enough to be out of high school...... Tonight we're going to the famous Sun outdoor cinema to sit in deckchairs under the stars and watch Meryl Streep in "Julie and Julia", then tomorrow off on the over 3,000 km next leg southwards to Perth - Watch this spot!

And then Broome, Wednesday 28.10, 4456 km

Finally made it! A great feeling to see the Indian Ocean - and to know Ros arrives tomorrow (she's already safely in Perth), we can relax a few days together and then start on the trip southwards back to Perth in far more comfort than I've had recently.... But back to last night....

Derby, Tuesday night, unnamed hotel, 17 18 S, 123 28 E

I'm not naming the hotel, I don't want to be sued, but I'm certainly going to tell Lonely Planet that their description of "basic"should be changed to "derelict"...... Anyway, after a few dollars here and there I managed to get a room a little (not much) better than what I've experienced in the Libyan Sahara.........

An interesting 350 km on the way though, in spite of the unrelenting sameness of the Fitzroy River floodplain - leaving Fitzroy Roadhouse I met a Police patrol car and realised it was only the second on this 4000 km trip (and the first was because of the road train accident between Cloncurry and Mount Isa, way, way back in time and road). Civilised and law-abiding drivers these Ozzies - it must be the road train terror? Or are they just as pleasant as they seem?

The test of that came a little later when I stopped for my mid-morning break at a designated rest stop, each normally about 100 km from the last (no facilities, just a necessary drive-off, trash buckets, maybe shelter from the sun, maybe an outback loo.... ) Enjoyed my ice coffee and cookie, drove off and landed kerbump in an unseen dustbowl in the middle of the gravel, suddenly almost up to my axles in hot red loose dust.... Oh no, not now, after so long and so far !!!!! Luckily a popular stopping place on this long stretch, but first attempts by helpful ozzies got me even deeper in dust and despair... Then along came http://www.thegoodoil.tv/ - you MUST check this website out! Paul Carter, driving around Australia on a motorbike that runs on recycled cooking oil - including all the fish and chips that Australian love - in spite of cracked ribs and other problems he's had on this trip so far, still journeying on, works it all out, his support truck pulls me out, we have a good laugh, all filmed, I sign an agreement that they can use this sequence in any film they might like to make, and on we go... Me thinking back to the Sahara again, the same extreme conditions, no forgiveness from nature for a simple mistake, the same friendliness and help between total strangers....

So on to Derby, where the 800 km long Fitzroy River finally runs out into the sea, not out into the real sea though, but into King Sound, the open Timor Sea still about 150 km to the NW through the labyrinth of the Buccaneer Archipelago. A windswept outpost, surrounded by mangrove swamps and mudflats, at 12 m tidal difference between high and low the 2cnd largest in the world (biggest is Bay of Fundy in Newfoundland I seem to remember from my vague sedimentological past - 15 to 18 m???). Right now a most grey, hot and oppressive place, in spite of all the help from the friendly lady at the visitor centre.....

Broome, Wednesday night, 17 57 S, 122 14 E

Lavishing the comfort of "Beaches of Broome" in a simple but elegant twin room that will be our "home" for the next few days, trying to wash the sweat and dust out of my clothes and mind while I look back over the last 15 days - what a roadtrip!

Unforgettable and unrepeatable.....First though, an apology to Derby - in the warm light of this morning's dawn I redid the town - after all, the night had gone without too many invasions - unlike an unforgettable Saharan "luxury hotel" when a whole ant colony decided to take over my bed just before dawn...

But I got out of NN Hotel and revisited the jetty, still driving over endless mudflats (high tide was in the night), but got my photo of the sailboat snug in its mangrove creek harbour. Then on to the old town gaol, the pioneer cemetery and the "prison boab" - all with remarkably frank accounts of the way the locals were treated until very recently, first the stealing of their land by the European pastoralists in the late 1800s, then the massacres, the segregation, the declaration of Australia as "terra nullis" - nomansland - when the Brits arrived..... Only now are they getting their rights. Maybe this frankness and willingness to really say "Sorry" sets Derby apart from the other communities I've seen so far - the locals here looking like they belong and not like disposessed waifs? Maybe just my imagination....

Then on to the final leg to Broome, nothing eventful, just thinking back to that day in March 2007 when we were visiting Cairns from Timor-Leste and I got bitten by the signs describing the "Savannah Way" across northern Ozz - the feeling "Gotta do it!" And now I done it! A fantastic trip - great people, landscapes and geology all the way!!! But what a bloody big country, one might say!

More on Broome later.....

Fitzroy stopover, Monday 26.10, 3940 km

And just crossed off another "MUST SEE" geological World Heritage site - the Geikie Gorge Devonian reef - or just a tiny part of the over 300 million year old reef system that crossed NW Ozz for 50 million years and was about half the size of today's biggie - the 2,000 km long Great Barrier reef off the Queensland coast way back there to the east.

I took an early morning cruise along a spectacular part of the gorge - with water in the river channel even now at the lowest end of the dry, the guide pointing out that the massive change in limestone cliff colour from white to dark grey way above our heads marks the "normal" and not the high water mark. At real high water during a flood the river goes over its banks, up to or over the clifftops we see - and spreads out over 30 km over the surrounding floodplains - so the brochure I read last night was right - a truly awesome sight, with only natural and artificial islands sticking out here and there - hopefully including Fitzroy Lodge, the village and (most of the modern highway. So the Fitzroy in flood is way up there as one of the 5 biggies in the world..

There are about 30 of us in the flat-bottomed electrically powered boat and as we cruise past these fantastic cliffs the guide tells us a lot about wildlife - the crocs, the roos, the fish, the plants and the trees, but very little about the rocks themselves, apart from telling us it's a big old reef and we're still learning a lot about it..... What a shame, as I can clearly see the bedding patterns in the cliff showing us the different parts of the reef - it wouldn't take much for the guides to make these grey rocks much more interesting! Instead of talking about threats to the Ozz environment, the guy could be saying - "Hey look, there's a big coral colony that broke off the top of the reef and slid down the front!" I restrain myself, keep quiet, BIG WHIMP - but here, like so many other places I've seen, the Ozzies need to be told more about the exciting history of their wonderful continent! Maybe then they'll stop raping it.....

I spend the rest of the day planning the next steps on the way to Broome and onwards to Perth, struggling with the war between this laptop, microsoft and the local wifi, trying to get this blog published..... A quick visit to the historic local pub as a lunch break was unsuccessful - I got totally turned off by the racial segregation between (aboriginal) public bar and (white) "restaurant" and retreated to the lodge and the laptop....

Fitzroy Crossing, Sunday 25.10, 3880 km

Fitzroy River Lodge, 18 12 S, 125 34 E

Yesterday was southwards, today westwards again, 290 km through the flat tablelands of the catchment area of the Fitzroy River, only occasional hillocks of granite with heaped-up rounded boulders, looking like giants’ playgrounds. Strong winds from the Tamani Desert to the south today too, and plenty dust devils, some I chased for ages, trying to get photos, some suddenly hit me sideways, so I largely kept to a sedate 80-90, better for fuel use too.

A fascinating area in terms of landforms – although a non-geologist would probably have called it flat and boring – that’s the fun thing with geology I was thinking, wherever you go you tune in to the landscape and try to work out why it is, what it is – here it seems the rivers have been flowing and the land has been rising for the last 20 million years or so, as Australia has pushed northwards against Asia (the big effects of that we saw in Timor...). So here we see the river cutting stepwise down through the underlying rocks, every few million years creating a new flood plain and tableland....

I pass the Tamani turnoff – the “El Diretissimo” route to Alice Springs through the desert, “only” about 800 km to the SE, but gravel and corrugated all the way – only for the dedicated and passionate 4Wdriver! The usual signs now and then to faraway cattle stations and tribal communities, all on gravel roads and barred to visitors, apart from a couple of tribal art galleries, but my campervan can’t manage the gravel and the galleries are closed anyway on a Sunday. Then about 70 km from Fitzroy, the really big cliff-line around Ngumpan, where the river has cut down to the level it has in Fitzroy itself today – quite spectacular buttes and pinnacles, no problem making cowboy films around here....

I stop at the rest area atop the cliffs, looking at the flatlying sandstones underneath me and am joined by Terry – a retired policeman from Bundaberg in southern Queensland, who is driving his BMW motorbike the opposite direction to me, having taken the whole Australian circuit clockwise - he’s now on his way home, a lot of it on the same route I’ve come - he’s only got about 3,000 km to go now, but admits he’s tired, especially in this heat (much more pleasant in Broome he says, not so violent heat).

After a few pleasant exchanges, we look at the same landscape and come to quite different conclusions – Terry says “I get strength from this – all over Australia I see these same beds testifying to the biblical flood”. For the 3rd time on this trip I’m locked into the same discussion with committed biblical creationists – each time with perfectly reasonable and friendly people, not with any dogmatic ignorance or unwillingness to discuss, but with a deep conviction that their Christian belief is incompatible with my scientific background. How I hate the dogmatic Richard Dawkins and his rampant atheism that does more to destroy religious peoples’ possible belief in evolutionary theory than to promote it – I myself don’t understand at all why evolutionary theory disproves the existence of God, a Supreme Being, the Unknown Prime Mover, the Big Bang, call Her what you will......

I try to explain that the different cliff-lines Terry has seen through his trip are of quite different ages, showing YES that Australia has been flooded, but many times, starting over a 2,000 million years ago, and in between parts have been uplifted, parts have been crushed together and then parts have been flooded yet again – and the cliff we’re looking at tells me of 340 million year old rocks exposed as the land has been uplifted quite recently, less than 20 million years ago. As I try to explain the physical certainties around radioactive half-lives to determine absolute ages and the wonders of the fossil record that support evolutionary theory, he remains totally unconvinced – “You can’t prove any of it” ..... I stop myself from the obvious like “I can prove a lot more than you can mate” and we shake hands part as friends, him driving his BMW ever eastwards and homewards, me looking at the Devonian cliffs realising that I may have been teaching geology for 40 years now, yet I’m not at all equipped for stand-up fights with committed creationists and I hate the Dawkins atheist line even more...

Ah well, on to Fitzroy River Lodge, just by the “old” crossing of the river itself, built in 1935 – which says something about just how “old” this place is. The new overpass bridge was built in 1974 and all the buildings belonging to the lodge are either on stilts or on artificial mounds so that they are even higher than the overpass – making even me believe the tourist hype that “the Fitzroy River in flood is an awesome sight” though not quite accepting “and one of the largest rivers in the world”. Right now most of the river and all of its creeks are nothing but sand, not much water in sight at all – but all that will change drastically in the next 4 to 6 weeks the locals tell me....

I get well established in my “donga” – up on a little artificial mound this too -half of a simple container with a small window, a door and all mod cons, not least air-con. Fine.... Internet connection a bit dodgy though, I’m several hundred metres away from the main lodge – we’ll see , if necessary I can work from the lodge itself.... Sit on the lodge veranda, enjoy an antipasto meant to be a starter, but more than big enough for me (realising again that Ros & I will get by very well by sharing 1 Ozzie main course, and notice that the evening air actually does get a little cooler around here......

Halls Creek, Saturday 24.10, 3590 km

Halls Creek, Kimberley Hotel 18 14 S, 127 40 E

Quite a nice place this, motel rooms around central bar & restaurant, swimming pool - and good airconditioning in the room - in this heat, essential.... The weather changed along the 350 km stretch from Kununurra - less and less cloud, less and less humid -no signs of the wet here yet..... A lot of cross-wind and the occasional dust devil buffeting the van though, so I had to drive slower than usual to avoid being blown into the path of oncoming road trains - especially not the one with an additional big sign on its front - EXPLOSIVES!

By chance I was reading last night about the guy who invented road trains - an Ozzie with a very Scandinavian name - Kurt Johannsen - who figured out the mechanics of how to link up 3-4 trailers to a truck so that they all followed the same track. This revolutionised movement of stock to market - before this they had to be herded by drovers over long distances, arriving at final destination to be slaughtered in poor shape. Now they're driven by road train to Broome and Wyndham, from where upwards of 200,000 live cattle are exported to Asia and the Middle East every year......... So now you know!


Interesting changing geology and landscape too today - first ear the coast, but decided not go see the croc farm at Wyndham, then along the faultline I flew over today, then a far-off view of the Bungles (I should have mentioned they're in the Purnululu National Park - Purnululu meaning "sandstone" in the local Kija tribal language of course (of course.......)). But couldn't see much - they were far away - 53 km along the only access gravel road, 3-4 hours by 4WD. And that was closed today because of the raging bushfires I saw from the plane yesterday.

I was thinking about the immense areas I've seen that have clearly been ravaged by fires this dry season - they've mainly burnt up the grass, not many of the trees, and although most have black trunks from the burn, they're still alive and sprouting new leaves - I guess as soon as the rains start the new grass will grow (like the Californian chapparal, some of the plant seeds actually need fire to crack their pods open!) and by next year all will be healed..... Ain't nature wonderful? Interesting too though that there's rarely been a recent fire on both sides of the road at once - the roads, narrow as they often are, must work as firebreaks.....

Had my first meal in a typical outback pub tomight, food ok, but not exceptional - I should have chosen the Thai menu! Sat at a table with a truckie, interesting chat - he drives on average 1100 km a day, unlike some trucks he's only allowed to drive in daylight - I forgot to ask why.... After a while I asked him about aborigines/indigenous Australians (confused as to which is correct - he said either) - his view is that the government is now doing what it can (finally!), but few take up the opportunities they're offered...... I guess it's very complex, and why are our western cultural values any good anyway? Reading more and more about indigenous beliefs, the dreamtime, the songlines - fascinating - the park ranger I talked to the other day said the aborigines believe that everything, everything goes in a circle, life, death, all of nature (including carbon dioxide - that's their view on "global warming" too....). Meanwhile in the tragic present, 65 % of Halls Creek population of 1600 is indigenous and 90 % of pregnant indigenous women are registered as alocoholics by the local hospital, 30 % of babies born having problems because of alcohol poisoning in the womb....

Ah well, on to Fitzroy Crossing and another geological World Heritage site today - absolutely the longest no-service single haul of the trip at 290 km, just under the camper's limit.....

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......

Mataranka Bitter Springs, Monday night, 2612 km, over the hump

NNWwards towards Darwin along the Stuart Highway, first noticing small changes – the dry Mitchell grass a little greener, the brush a little bushier? Then suddenly we’re out of the dry “Red Centre” and into the seasonally wet “Top End”, with open forestland

Boring stone monuments to explorers, national heroes (& the occasional heroine), signs to now overgrown WWII airfields, staging posts, field hospitals, but still the inexorable 100 to 150 km between roadhouses and nothing much else apart from signposts pointing along dirt tracks to far away cattle stations in between (“Nutwood Downs, 100 km”). And watch your fuel gage and the temporary signs by the road (“Next rest stop 89 km, no fuel”, “next fuel 160 km” for example.....
Few of the monuments are worth a stop, but the choices break the monotony – I break for a few minutes at Newcastle Waters, now a ghost town, but once a major centre for drovers going in all directions, then, following a small road train back to the main road – I see a truck with 2 trailers, horses (for local herding), all the basics for long term work out there (but I do note a small petrol-driven generator – not far too basic!). Remember Anna & Rebecca’s excitement seeing two spurred cowboys chomping their burgers and fries in a diner in Arizona 25 years ago, then the let-down when they jumped into their pickup, horse trailer in tow....

A brief stop too at the Daly Waters Historical Pub, much acclaimed in all the guides, but very touristy and “overquaint”– although they apparently have great raves most nights with cool contemporary aboriginal music and the sweet Irish colleen behind the bar served me up a mean barra wrap (Barramundi – the local catfish, delicious!)

Also a stop at one of the old airfields – this one first a staging post on the many day long flights from London on to Sydney in the 1930s, then a frontline field during the war – we Europeans don’t realise that northern Australia was under threat of Japanese invasion in 1942 and air attacks on Darwin killed more people than the much more famous attack on Pearl Harbour......

And then the most bizarre sight of the whole trip so far – I’ve wondered at the determination/masochism of the 3 bikers I’ve seen on the trip – imagine cycling with a heavy load over these distances in this heat? And the recurrent drive-by of a road-train at over 100 k an hour, blasting you to smithereens and choking/coating you with dust? But then suddenly comes a fella leading 2 camels pulling a sawn-off Toyota Hi-Ace – front engine end all gone, so now a modern day gypsy caravan – I took pics, asked him where he was going - “Back to Alice mate, should make it by Christmas” Now there’s the eternal optimist – of course the only reason he was on the main road just there was to get over a river flood channel, but even so... With around a 1,000 km still to go....

And on to Mataranka where a dip in the thermal pool, a chance of a nice cabin with power, shower, a real bed make me want to cool it and hang around here for a couple of days.... I'm now over halfway after all!

(More about Cambrian aquifers by the way – the Papua connection is of course a load of b...s... – the water in the aquifer flows from the tablelands and then out into the rivers heading northwards to the coast . and these "hot" springs aren’t truly thermal – the 30+ degrees of the water in the aquifer just shows how long the air round here has been so b.... hot......