North by Northeast

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Blink and you’ve missed it! That’s how I feel about the last month. Since my last blog we have managed to rack up over 7000kms and spend 4 times more than our budget allowed but we’ve had the most amazing time! We came the long way around but the Top End of Australia was our main reason for doing this trip and it certainly did not disappoint!

Leaving the beautiful Ningaloo Reef behind, we made our way into unfamiliar territory having never been this far north in the west before. To be quite honest, the start of this leg was very boring and uneventful. Apart from there being a few more trees along the highway and it becoming slightly more green the further north you go, there certainly isn’t a lot to see up here until you reach Broome.

About 450kms north of Coral Bay we reached our first towns, Dampier and Karratha. These are probably some of the youngest towns in Australia, being established as recently as the 1960’s. It was immediately obvious to us that these towns were not the typical holiday destination and with the risk of sounding mean, these places look like they were hit with the ugly stick! Quite obviously designed by men for men! (Sorry!) However, to be fair these towns are extremely important to the Australian economy. Dampier, Karratha and Port Hedland (a bigger town just further north) possess the largest ports in Australia exporting mineral / iron ore from the Pilbara region as well as being one of the biggest suppliers of salt in the world. As well as this, located on the Burrup Peninsula near Karratha, is the Northwest shelf gas plant, Australia’s largest supplier of gas contributing over 1% of Australia’s GDP!!!. Obviously there is a lot of money floating around in these parts yet it looks like people come here to do a job, make their money then leave! There certainly aren’t many pretty places for people to live and some of the miners / engineers accommodation reminded me of the old Jarrow flats… lovely!!! Certainly not what you would expect! Recently a salary record was broken here with unskilled labourers being paid $150,000 per annum …. that’s no qualifications required guys!!!

Although still very industrial, Port Hedland was a bit prettier and the guys here seemed to have more of a playful, humorous streak which was evident by the termite mounds on the road into town, each of which possesses a hard hat and a jacket! Some of them even had boots!!!

We saw our first signs to beware of crocodiles in Karratha so being eager to see them we camped by different rivers each night (of course staying well back!). Alas, night after night we were disappointed and started to doubt whether there were any at all. Unfortunately though, no amount of my bargaining with Rich (I’ll do all the dishes for the remainder of the trip etc etc) would convince him to stand by the waters edge and stamp his feet just so I could get a glimpse of one! Ah well …. we continued to live in hope!

Another 800kms on from Karratha we finally reached Broome, a “big” town with a very relaxed, outback feel to it. Broome is only “big” because it has everything you need, including a busy airport, however with respect to actual size, it isn’t very big at all. We drove around the whole thing in about 10 minutes and saw nearly every street and everything it has to offer. In fact I’m quite sure Narangba is bigger!!! While in Broome we spent some time in Chinatown and visited Gantheaume Point with it’s red cliffs and dinosaur footprints. Of course, we couldn’t visit Broome without taking a walk along one of the world’s most famous beaches, Cable Beach, so named because of the communications cable that linked Broome to Indonesia. Just for the record, Cable Beach is stunning and you can see why it is within the top 5 in the world. This said, the possible presence of crocodiles and an information board telling you when the last irukandji sting was kept us out of the water and so we opted for a drink in the fancy wine bar overlooking the beach instead!

If it wasn’t for the pearling industry Broome wouldn’t be here so I went along for a pearl tour to learn of it’s intriguing history. Of course the aborigines were diving in the shallow waters for pearl shells long before the “white fella” arrived in Australia but it was the white man who presented it to the rest of the world and made it into a huge business. There is a lot of interesting history there, far too much to put into a blog (so I will spare you!) but I learnt about Blackbirders, white men (pearl masters) that used to go into black camps and bribe or simply take the men away in chains so they could take them onto their boats and make them dive for pearls. They were treated terribly; if they were unsuccessful on their dives (not returning with a pearl shell) they used to have their knuckles broken by the butts of the guns of the white men on board and were then thrown back in the sea. If they were continually unsuccessful, they were simply left out at sea while the boat returned to shore! This was only the start of some hideous, torturous behaviour that went on in the pearling industry and it wasn’t just towards to aboriginals. Similar to today’s over fishing situations, the pearl shells were over fished and consequently the boats had to go out further and further out to sea and so became the introduction of the hard hat diver. Aborigines were either too scared (or too clever!) to agree to diving with the hard hat and so more and more Asians were employed by the pearl masters. The stories about the hard hat divers are quite unbelievable … of course it was very dangerous for many different reasons and evidence of this is seen in the Japanese Cemetery in town which is the resting place for over 990 Japanese hard hat divers! The last hard hat diver retired sometime in the 1950’s and had the “bends” over 40 times! The diving attire they made the divers wear is just astonishing! How any of them survived is nothing short of a miracle if you ask me!

At the turn of the century there were 403 pearling boats working out of Broome which supplied 80% of the world’s Mother of Pearl shell. Of course, back then it was the shell they were interested in whereas now it tends to be the byproduct (the pearl itself) which is of interest. Fortunately now, there are several established pearl farms, which means no more divers and no more taking from the wild!

From Broome we headed up to Derby which is famous for it’s 11 metre tides, the biggest in Australia. As a result they have what are called the Horizontal waterfalls because the tides go out so quickly. Also in Derby we visited the famous Prison Tree, which is a large Boab tree in which the “Blackbirders” used to keep their aboriginal divers in when they were on route to the sea. These days it is only inhabited by King browns!

After Derby we headed into Kimberley country which is famous for it’s boab trees. The West Kimberleys aren’t really much to shout about, it is nice scenery but nothing spectacular really, it wasn’t until we were in the Eastern Kimberleys when you start to see why they are so famous. The Kimberleys are famous for their ranges (which we saw) but also for their waterfalls on the Gibb River Road which unfortunately for us was closed due to flooding!!! The waterfalls must have been quite spectacular!!!! Another reason to come back in the future, maybe at a different time of year!!

As we neared the WA/NT border we detoured up to Wyndham, a town famous for having the largest saltwater crocodiles in the world although we still didn’t see any! The Cambridge Gulf in Wyndham is the meeting point of five different rivers including the Ord River which was dammed in the very early 1970’s to create the largest freshwater lake in the Southern Hemisphere, Lake Argyle. Set within the Carrboyd Ranges and covering an area of over 1000 square kilometres, it is BIG! At full capacity it has 80 times the volume of Sydney Harbour and the only way to see it is by flying or spending at least a week on a boat! This was our next and last stop before leaving WA. We had planned to spend just one night here however, on arrival at the tourist village we discovered we had a slight problem with the brakes …. in that we had none!!! It is just as well Rich had slowed down enough on our approach that he was able to stop the car and the trailer using the handbrake! It was a small miracle that this happened here as the day before we had been up at the five rivers lookout in Wyndham at approximately 900 feet …. it was a very steep descent! Thankfully, the RACQ came to our rescue and while I stayed at the tourist park with Woody, Rich went off to town with the tow truck. Despite feeling like we were miles from anywhere, we managed to have the car fixed within 24 hours and after some sight seeing on the lake, a swim for Woody and a look at the “croc-infested” Ord River downstream of the dam we were soon back on track.

We managed to time our arrival into the Northern Territory with the arrival of Tropical Cyclone Paul and the school Easter holidays! Great timing eh?! Fortunately for us though, just when it seemed like TC Paul was heading straight for our path it turned around and went the other way. The threat of the cyclone also seemed to scare off a lot of the holiday makers so it was not quite as busy as we thought it would be. It was so quiet in fact that we managed to get Katherine thermal pools all to ourselves. With the temperatures still being well into their high 30’s we found it quite amusing that we were going into thermal springs (which are about 34 degrees) to cool down!

Shortly after arriving in the NT, we said goodbye to Woody as we dropped him off in kennels and as before, he didn’t look back at us once when he saw the exercise yard, the clam shell pool and the other dogs! For our first night in the Kakadu region we made the HUGE mistake of camping near the northern wetlands. Immediately after sunset we were absolutely bombarded with mosquitoes and were very much confined to our tent. Even in the morning, we could barely see out of the windows because there were so many of these hungry little creatures absolutely covering our windows!!! When we finally plucked up the courage to go outside (after emptying nearly a full can of insect spray on every inch of our bodies!), Richie sprayed the tent with mortein which unfortunately had no effect on them at all!!! So, in what must have been record time we packed away the tent and jumped into the car and headed for our first adventure on the Adelaide River …Jumping Crocs!

OK, we have done some pretty cool things on our trip like our swimming with wild sea lions and swimming with octopus on Ningaloo Reef, but this (for me!) has to take the biscuit!!! This was absolutely AMAZING!!!! This experience left me buzzing! This was a 1 hour cruise on the Adelaide River, a croc infested river on the outskirts of Kakadu National Park, and almost immediately as the boat left the jetty we were accompanied by 2, 3 and 4 metre crocodiles which stealthily swam out from the mangroves and swam right up to the boat. The crew encourage them to jump out of the water for bait just to show you how high they can jump and how their bodies move. I had seen this behaviour in Australia Zoo but nothing comes close to seeing these creatures in their natural habitat. These animals left me terrified (you’ve got no chance in the water with these beauties and consequently I spent the next week telling Rich to get back from the water!!!) yet I have a very healthy respect and admiration for a creature which is so well designed it has barely changed in over 150 million years! When I think about it I am still buzzing!!!

We spent the next week exploring the beautiful wetlands, rocky escarpments, aboriginal rock art, waterfalls and bush land of both Kakadu and Litchfield. We had to do a couple of creek crossings as it is still the wet season and many of the tracks were still closed … therefore a great excuse to treat ourselves to a 1 hour scenic flight over Kakadu on Easter Sunday morning! I’ll not say too much about the parks, I think the photos speak for themselves! I have so many beautiful photos I’m going to struggle to decide which ones to put on here!! After Kakadu and Litchfield we spent some time in Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) National Park and took a 4 hour cruise through the 20 million year old gorge which was spectacular!!! (No swimming here either ….they pulled a 3.7 metre croc out of here just 3 weeks ago and they aren’t meant to even be in here!!!).

I’m certainly used to the outback now but it still amuses me that over the past two days we have travelled nearly 1200km and turned only 1 corner!!! In the last 30 minutes we have just crossed the border and have made it back to our home state!!!! Woo hoo …. Good Morning Queensland!!!!

Hope you enjoy the photos and we’ll catch up again soon ……

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Photos

Northwest Gas Shelf Project
Karratha

Sauropod Footprints
Gantheaume Point (thought to be 130 million years old)

Pearl lugger - Broome
Pearl Diving boat

River crossing in the Kimberleys
Mary RIver

Water Monitor in The Grotto
The Grotto, Wyndham - A natural gorge

The Big Croc
The only croc we saw in Wyndham!

Ord River Gorge
Downstream of Lake Argyle

Orange footed scrubfowl
Builds nest up to 3 metres tall (on the ground of course!)

Comments

[lisa]

Hi Babe Sounds like you both have had a fab time can't believe its been nearly a year since you started your travels!!! I hope you have enjoyed every minute you have seen some wonderful things bet you don't want to come back be hard to get back to the real world especially the swear word WORK!! It late at the moment so only a short one will ring you this weekend as busy last weekend be good to chat and catch up Take care love and miss ya loads your bessie mate xxxxxx

[Roy and Linda]

Water and crocodiles
Hi, Richard Hayley and Woody We had no idea that there is so much water in that part of the world, no wonder it attracts so many crocodiles. Lesley had sent a copy of the jumping croc to Linda's mobile, there was no caption and the picture was so small we thought in disbelief that it was a croc but came to think it was the Woodster having fun in the water! After all it was a crocodile, now we have seen the awesome photographs! Is it true that if attacked by a crocodile you can hold their jaws shut because the opening jaw muscles are so weak as opposed to the closing/crushing muscles? I must have got that gem off a Steve Irwin programme, he would be the only person crazy enough to put the theory to the test. Is that tiny speck on the back of the female orb really the male or have we missed something? The frog looked very similar to our common toad, the last one of which we saw when Linda rescued it from the wheel trim of a parked car, looked like a lump of mud and could not understand why it should be there! Loved the rock art must be lots of that still indiscovered in the outback. The green machine has done well, after the distance, heat, running surfaces etc and it is reassuring that with the odd subsequent small technical hitch it can be fixed as easily in such relatively remote areas as it could be in the cities. It is amazing how resourceful people are when they have to be. We're almost sorry your trip has come to an end as we looked forward to your updates. Still we can read them again and again. Bet you're looking forward to moving back into your house and settling down once again. Good luck with jobs etc. Take care! Lots of love, Roy and Linda xxx