We had a lot of ground to cover
and a few things to do so we were up and at em’ early. We went for a walk down
to the nearby falls and the boys had a great time playing ‘paddle pop’ races
using leaves as their boats.
Once back in the van I endeavored
to create a dust proof seal around Jack’s window to minimise the amount of dust
being spread through the van. I had just managed to finish my magnificent
creation when De noticed that one of the latches hadn’t been done up...rather
than it being a bad seal.....oh well!
We hit the track and crawled our
way back out along the very rough track we came in on last night, passing the
contorted Triton on the way out. Below is a snippet of the track...
Back on the Gibb we bounced along in the dirt
for another 100 and something kilometres pausing only at the Gibb River
Crossing for a pic.
For the avid followers of the blog you will remember that
we weren’t even planning on travelling across the Gibb and that it was only
decided at a river side meeting in Windjana Gorge that we should traverse it.
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| How the boys keep themselves entertained for countless hours! |
Doing the Gibb is one thing, but
now we were turning off the Gibb and heading north up to the Mitchell Plateau
along an even rougher road...... So we turned onto the Kalumburu road and headed north
for the 70km trip to Drysdale Station.
The road still wasn’t miserable but it
wasn’t the M1 and the corrugations got deeper and wider and the river crossings
became more frequent and deeper...which the boys were very happy about. At each
crossing there was a mad dash, with Jack getting his IPod out to film it, to
make a river crossings compilation video, and Sam to wind down the window and
hang as far out of it as possible in the hope of getting wet!
Once we arrived at Drysdale River
Station, that now derives most of its income from tourism, we took Gator and
Rufus off and emptied all of the fishing gear etc; out of the back of Izzy,
repacking it with our tents and camping gear. Around two we rolled out and
headed north again, taking two hours to travel the 100kms to the King Edward
River Camp Ground. The road wasn’t that bad with us sitting on 70 – 90kms/hr
most of the way. The thing that really slowed us down was the huge number of
creek and river crossings, as well as the last 7kms of rocky creek bed that we
had to traverse at a crawl.
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| Topping the tank up at Drysdale River Station...ouch |
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| There are two gates to open at Drysdale River Station so the boys thought they would run it.. The forgot it was about 800m..in bare feet...on a dirt road...had to laugh |
The best part of the day was
crossing the King Edward River. It was running pretty hard and finally we were
going to get something other than our tyres wet..the boys (and me) were
excited! We put it into low 4WD and walked our way across the river, with Izzy
not missing a beat.
A sample of our day on the Gibb.
De crossing the Drysdale...what a woman and the last crossing is the King Edward River.
After setting up we headed to the
river for a swim and a look around. De went investigating and found a waterfall
downstream from the crossing. It is incredible how much water flows down these
rivers! On the edge of the falls we noticed a large lizard had fallen down into
a ‘hole’ about 5 foot deep. Being the greenie that I am I whipped over and
pulled a small shrub out lowering it down to him (or her). After a couple of
attempts he jumped on and was rescued from certain death..watch out Harry
Butler! An interesting side fact that we learnt later is the holes are formed
when rocks find their way into small crevices and when the water runs over the
top of them the rocks ‘wobble’ around and around gradually wearing away. This
hole was pretty big and I wondered how long ago the process started.
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| About 1km down from the crossing in the video above. |
The boys are now very proficient
at getting fires going from scratch...well...with matches anyway, so every night
we now have a bonfire to sit beside!
We blew up the matresses, climbed into our
sleeping bags and went to sleep. Not long after this the local dingos started
to howl. It was pretty erie as there were a lot of them, they sounded pretty
close and it was the first time we have encountered it. We drifted off to a
unique background music
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| We thought we had been to the middle of nowhere a couple of times.... but this is pretty much on the other side of nowhere |
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