Kununurra

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By midday we had finished seeing everything we had wanted to see in Katherine and started the long 5 hour trip to Kununurra. Kununurra is situated just over the border into WA and is the East Kimberley district. The scenery is pretty boring until about 10km before Victoria River, at this point the landscape changes from flat to tall red escarpments everywhere, at this stage the scenery is similar to what you would have seen in the movie ‘Australia”. When crossing into Western Australia, there is a quarantine site on the border, we could not take any fresh fruits, vegetable, potatoes, soil, plants flowers and about a dozen other things, due to the possibility of new diseases and fruit fly getting introduced to WA, as we had just stocked up on fruit and vegies in Katherine, then unaware of the quarantine regulations, we hid most of our food in a cupboard under one of the beds, just before the border the girls and I stopped to take a photo, on returning back to van there is Kevin pulling out all our fruit and vegies and putting them back into the fridge, he said he had read the sign and they would search the car looking for the food, he had chickened out. When we got to the border all the girl did was hop in the van open the fridge filled up 2 shopping bags with all beautiful fresh avo’s, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, etc said thank you reminded us to wind the clock back 1 ½ hour and said goodbye, I bet all our food went into her fridge. At least Kevin had forgotten about all my frangipani clippings other wise I would have lost them to. By the time we had reached the border it was 7pm NT time so I was nice to wind the clock back to 5:30pm as we still had about 100km to go to our next stop and now no salad stuff to have with Taco’s for dinner.

We had been told about the Lake Argyle caravan park on our travels, and had decided to stay here for the night. It has an infinity pool overlooking the lake and the best view, this is one place we would recommend you stay a day or two. The next day we were up bright and early due to the time difference, the girls wanted to have a swim in the pool and Kevin and I wanted to enjoy the view for a little while. We also drove across the dam wall and had morning tea in a little park near the Hydro power station.
Lake Argyle was created by damming the Ord River and provides a storage reservoir for the Ord irrigation area. It is the largest man made lake in the Southern hemisphere, at flood capacity it is estimated the lake covers over 2000sq km.
Another stop we made was to Argyle Homestead. The homestead was originally owned by the Durack family and was built 1880’s on their property Argyle Downs Station. It had to be moved stone by stone in the 1970’s, following plans for the damming of Lake Argyle, to its site now. The Durack family were a prominent cattle family in the Kimberley’s, there are even a couple of books written about the family. The museum gives a fascinating insight into the lives of the early pioneers in the Kimberley.

From Lake Argyle we headed into Kununurra, then on to Wyndham to go to the Five rivers lookout which is on top of the Bastion Ranges and provides a good view to identify the 5 rivers that flow into the Cambridge Gulf (King, Ord, Durack, Forrest and the Pentacost). If it is a cloudless night it is worth going up for the sunset. Also in Wyndham is the largest Boab tree in Australia and boy is it huge. By this stage it was getting late in the day and we had planned to stay the night at a caravan park just south of Wyndham, but the road in was so rough and corrugated that we decided to turn around and go back to Kununurra for the night.

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