Everything had dried out over the
past two days so the road out was plain sailing. Just outside of Derby is a
majestic old Boab tree, with a sad history, that is thought to be well over
1000 years old, maybe 1500 yrs. In the 1800’s and early 1900’s ‘blackbirders’ would round up as many young
Aboriginal males as they could find, chain them together and then march them
20kms+ a day to the coast to be used essentially as slave labour, as they received
no pay, especially by the pearler shellers. Whilst it was illegal a blind eye
was turned for many years and the Boab tree was called the Prison Tree as this
is where they could chain their gangs to and wait for the pearlers to come and
take their pick.
We headed into Derby and refreshed
a few stocks and grabbed some hot chips for lunch, as it will be a while before
we see another fast food shop! It is always hard to tell how many chips you are
going to get as there is no exact measurement for $5 worth of chips so De
ordered the family size container. Well they must have bloooody big families
around here as I was considering getting my climbing boots on just to undo the
sticky tape that was holding the butchers paper together! We headed down to the
jetty and began the slow pain staking task of eating them all even inviting a
couple of gray nomads to join us as there was no way we were going to get
through them.
We rolled out of town and somewhat
apprehensively turned onto the Gibb River Road. For some reason this road has
achieved iconic status amongst 4WDers and we were about to take it on, well the
first part of it anyway! It was quite funny as the first 100km of the road, up
until the turn off to Windjana was sealed!! Bahaha!
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| Termite mound that was is like a giant drippy castle |
We arrived at Windjana and none
other than Logan and Larissa were there. They were supposed to be going to May
river but it was to wet so they ended up here...so we parked up beside them and
opened a beer! The rest of the afternoon was spent chatting with fellow campers
and the main subject was the Gibb, what were conditions like, how deep were the
crossings, where should we visit. I must admit I felt a touch out of place as
our plan was to do Windjana and then head down to tunnel creek and back onto
the sealed road that is about 200kms the south of the Gibb!
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| The special lure that Logan loaned to the boys for their trip to Barradise |
Slowly, ever so slowly I started
to change my mind around to ‘doing the gibb’. I am usually the first up for
things that are considered ‘iconic’ but this one just hadn’t made it onto my
radar but hearing about how magnificent the gorges are and how the road had
just been graded softened my stance.
We enjoyed the evening, but were
smart enough to call it stumps well before it got to messy!
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