Bungle Bungle Land

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The drive from Katherine to Kununurra takes you along 530km of Victoria Highway. Otherwise known as the forgotten highway. If they don’t start repairing it soon it will totally fall apart. Without warning you are faced with a road full of pot holes, some a foot deep. It was a boring drive, made even more annoying by my CD player refusing to play anything. I also caught up with a vehicle that was spraying tar onto the Road. Before I realised what he was doing to front of the car was covered in tar. This took ages of hard scrubbing to get most of it off.

All the other state borders that I have crossed have signs saying don't take fruit, veg etc over the border. But in Western Australia you have to stop at a checkpoint and they search your car. Well they make it look like they search your car; they didn't find anything that I was carrying.

I made it to Kununurra in record time as I have just crossed the time zone and put my clock back an hour and a half. After settling into what appears to be a nice hostel I booked a couple of tours for the following day and went to watch the sun set which was pretty crap compared with the ones at Darwin and Cooinda. The locals all seem to like it though.

The following morning I was up at 4.30am to catch my flight over the Bungle Bungle’s. The flight lasted for 2 ½ hours and covered the whole area. It was definitely the best way to see lots of scenery in a short space of time. Half way through the trip we touched down on an earth runway to drop a couple of people off for a three day safari. With stones flying everywhere we took off again and headed back.

On the way back we passed over the world’s biggest and richest diamond mine. Diamonds have been sold from this mine for as much as $1million for 0.2 grams.
The diamond mine has its own runway and they have just discovered that there are diamonds underneath it worth over $200million, making it the most expensive runway in the world. The local roads are made out of the waste that comes out of the diamond mine. There are millions of very tiny pieces of diamond that are too small to extract from the waste to literally you are driving on diamond encrusted roads.

In the afternoon I drove out to Lake Argyle that I had flown over in the morning. This is a man made lake made my damning the river Ord. It contains 18 times more water than Sydney harbour and in flood can hold 55 times the amount of water. Enough water evaporates and escapes every day to supply Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide with all their water for a year!!!

As the lake is so big it is classed as an inland sea and all boats have to have the same safety equipment as if they were on the ocean. I took a tour boat out round some of the island in the lake and then watched the sun set from the middle of the lake. After the sun had gone down a few of us jumped ship and went for a swim. Despite the water being 47 metres deep it was quite warm. I tried not to think about the 25,000 crocodiles that live in the lake.
After safely getting back to dry land the sun had completely gone. I had to drive 100km back to the hostel in the dark. Now driving in the dark isn’t a problem but for some reason every animal within a 100 miles radius wants to go and stand on the road when it gets dark. I avoided killing anything significant and made it back safely.

I got an early night after all my swimming as I had yet another early morning the next day as I made my way to Broome.

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