Into the red – Karijini National Park

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“Back on the road again”……. and having spent longer in Exmouth than planned we had a lot of miles to cover in less time than we had hoped, but looking at the schedule we still had time for a National park or two before Darwin. We were on the Northern highway and this meant we were in the land of the road-trains again… some of these monsters had three trailers attached and came with their own wind vortex that made it a very good idea to hang onto the wheel tightly and get as far over your side of the road as possible when they passed. Certainly none of them stopped for the wildlife and there was plenty of roadkill, everything from birds-of-prey to full sized and now rather inflated cows, which you could smell long before you saw.


After our first 6 hours of driving (the royal “we” that is), starting a little after sunrise when a lot of the roos had hunckered down for the day out of the sun, what a good idea! Just remind me why we were up driving in the heat of the day? Oh yes because those kamikaze buggers get free run of the place at night and we don’t want to lose any more money or our lives, so whilst they are keeping cool we are out sweating our whatsits off as they slept.


We were going through petrol at a rate of knots as we racked up the miles, going to a gas station twice on some days. For that reason the air con was a luxury that we saved for the part of the day when we just couldn’t take the heat, normally around 11.30 - 3.00 and even then we would turn it on and off. At all other times it was 2 x 100 air conditioning, i.e. 2 windows at 100kph…. I don’t think I have ever drunk so much water in my life!


I’ll stop there as I am starting to rant like Geoff. We had been told that Karijini National Park was a must see on our route to Darwin and we weren’t disappointed. We had been warned about the flies here, which were worse than elsewhere and that’s saying something. The way it was put to us was, that we would laugh at the people sporting silly fly-net hats for about 5 minutes, but after 10 we would be asking how much they were willing to sell it for!! They were right……

Anyway, we walked to Fortescue Falls and then onto Fern Pool, both with amazing rock strata either side. Although it was only 30 minutes, I make a point of saying we walked because this became very rare as we got further North, the heat and humidity even in their winter was just a bit much for us. We had a nice refreshing dip in Fern pool and then after lunch walked down to Circular pool. Most people view the pool from the lookout point at the top, take pics and then back into their air con and have a tinny, so after the walk down into the gorge we had the pool to ourselves and tucked away deep down in the shade it was actually quiet cool. After our walk back up to the camper we had the “windows down” air con and parked at the top of a gorge for the night and hoped for a breeze as we enjoyed a glass of warm cheap plonk.

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