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Published: October 4th 2009
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Day 157 - Bungle Bungles
The morning after the night before and luckily neither of us wake up with any ill effects after the experimental dinner we ate! We seem to have picked the dawn chorus tree to camp under again so there was no lie in for us! There was even a queue at the dunny so the birds had done a good job in waking everyone up today!
We pack up our little tent and dust down the bedding as best we can then head off in the direction of the Piccaninny Creek car park for some more walking. To be able to witness the apparently most spectacular Piccaninny Gorge itself you need to do an overnight hike but it’s an unmarked track so would require a compass and a bit more experience than we currently have. Instead we’re going to feast our expectant eyes over Piccaninny Creek from the lookout. A short walk along the creek bed and along some narrow ledges soon leads us to a magnificent view with spectacular early morning colours. It’s definitely giving us the wow factor now! We’ve missed all the crowds again so it’s just us exploring this little bit
of wilderness at the moment and we’re loving the peace.
We start the walk back towards Cathedral Gorge and we’re getting what the Bungle Bungles are all about now, it’s quite amazing to be stood in amongst it all. We’ve seen a couple of sight-seeing planes fly over which is how a lot of people view the ranges, helicopters are also popular but you have to make the journey in to get one of those and we haven’t seen any fly since we’ve been here. Fellow bloggers Lynne and Chris took a flight over it all and have photos on their
Hi from WA , Kununurra blog.
This is a great walk in a stunning setting that delivers you to a huge amphitheatre where our voices and those of the birds bounce around the walls! There are fish in the waterhole but there’s not much water left now at the end of what has been a very dry season.
We stay here a while, looking at the reflections of the rocks in the water and eating a snack bar or two! We start to hear voices coming in our direction so gather our things up so more people can enjoy the
quiet like we did although it wouldn’t have lasted long as a rather large tour group was also headed in the same direction! We managed to avoid them by taking the Domes walk which gave us a close up view of the stripped sandstone beehive domes most people associated with the Bungle Bungles. The weathered, honeycomb rock is really interesting to look at and the colours are magnificent. “Bravo” Mother Nature once again.
That ended our walking activity here so all there was for us to do was navigate our way back to the highway through the 53kms of rough terrain! We made a quick stop at the Visitors Centre and then we were on our way. There was far less oncoming traffic today which made the road easier to negotiate as we’re quite often on the wrong side of the road if the corrugations are less! It’s a bit tricky as there are lots of blind corners but as usual Darryl does an excellent job of negotiating all the creek crossings, the deep bull dust traps and the jutting boulders strewn around the track.
Our eyes nearly fall out of our head and I’m too stunned to
even take a photo when we see Nulkie on his bicycle heading towards us. This chap is clearly mad! We give him a wave, shout good luck and hope that he’s got plenty of water, grit and determination to get him the rest of the way as when we saw him he was only 12 kms in and things get so much worse from there.
Back at the highway and we’re breathing huge sighs of relief because we made it in and out with no drama, hurrah! Back at Warnum, Sweetie is standing proudly in the compound waiting to re-join the adventure and we’re soon on our way to a free camp area for the night.
There are two free camps near to the entrance of the Bungle Bungles and we could have left the caravan here whilst we went in but we were driving in the wrong direction to take the chance that others would be doing the same so instead decided on the compound at Warnum. The first, Spring Creek is chocka block with caravans, how funny is that! The second, Leycesters Rest (Ord River) is totally empty but we park up here anyway and start
to clear the car of dust from our little trip! At 3 o’clcock there’s still nobody here and I start to wonder if there’s a better place to spend tonight seeing as we’ve finished all our clearing up. I spot another free camp closer to Fitzroy Crossing called Mary Pool. It takes me me a while to make the decision but we decide we’re going to go for it so pack the caravan back up and hit the road!
Our journey takes us past the road to Wolfe Creek, THE Wolfe Creek for those of you brave enough to watch the film! We might watch it when we’re back home to see if we recognise any bits!
We also pass through Halls Creek, another of these towns with a dodgy reputation on the road but it looks perfectly normal and not too different to many other outback towns we’ve come across. It seems that a lot of the remote towns are mainly Aboriginal communities and they have a very different lifestyle which is often interpreted as messy or disorganised or run-down. Considering the estate we used to live on we’re hardly in a position to comment! Good old
Frederick Thomas!
The free ranging cattle are roaming close to the road now and we’d overlooked how early the sun goes down now we’re in WA! We end up travelling through dusk which is very nerve racking as the cattle just wander into the road and we’re also on watch for anything that ‘bounds’. Darryl drives accordingly and for about twenty minutes we’re driving in the dark before finally reaching Mary Pool. We have a concrete creek crossing giving us access to the very spacious free camp where we find somewhere to park up and start to prepare dinner.
I ask the young English couple (northern accents anyway) who are camped next door if they know where the toilets are but the girl says there aren’t any and this is just a camp where there’s nothing, only somewhere to park. She didn’t seem impressed with the place at all so I left them to it and wandered over to another couple to see if they knew. Of course there are toilets here and they are smart, clean, flushable ones even though they’re the good old ‘drop’ variety! There’s also fire pits, wood BBQs and plenty of free wood
already chopped up for campers to use. So on the contrary there’s lots here and it’s very well set up. I went back to let them know where the loo’s were so they didn’t have to pee behind the tree for no good reason!
That was it for us, a nice cooked dinner and we went to bed happy to be surrounded by fellow campers.
Dar and Sar
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Jan Kettle
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View from Creek Lookout
What a wonderfully spectacular photo this is - it's our desktop photo now and could stay there for a while unless/until you come up with an even more majical photo! (the photo regularly changes depending where you've just been!). xxx Mum K