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Published: August 4th 2012
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Day 29 – Saturday 28
th July – Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary to Windjana Gorge
Mark and I got up at 6am and started packing up at a leisurely pace, supping our tea and then lattes (did we mention our espresso cooker thing and the milk frother??) and watching the bird life along Annie Creek. The kids seemed to need a lie in so we let them sleep until after 7. They have been taking themselves off to bed willingly at around 8pm and are generally getting up an hour earlier than they would do at home. Us grown-ups are getting a lot more sleep than at home and we are feeling like our batteries are being properly recharged.
At 8.30 am we drove out of Mornington on towards the last bit of the Gibb River Road. We had one last gorge we wanted to see – Bell Gorge. The car park at the gorge was pretty full so we were expecting the place to be quite crowded, however after the 15 minute walk to the top of the gorge and the 10 minute scramble to the bottom we found just a few groups of people enjoying the scenery.
The water was a deep blue and nicely chilled, the sides of the gorge steep and dramatic and the falls very picturesque. We had a picnic and a swim and took the obligatory photos then hit the road again.
The road towards Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek off the Gibb River Road turned out to be the worst road we have driven on on the whole trip (with the exception of a few patches on the road to Mitchell Falls). So not a great stretch of road to let me have a go at driving!! I now understand how much more tiring it is driving on unsealed roads as you cannot take your eyes off the road for a second in case you miss a rock, dip or other hazard. Mark must have been reeeally tired to let me drive! But it was all good and we arrived at Windjana Gorge at about 4pm, just in time to set up camp and watch the dark green rock face of the gorge turn orange in the sunset. It really is stunning and the photos don’t do the place justice.
The guide books say that the best time to walk
along the Gorge is early morning so we made ourselves comfortable round our tent and forced the kids to do some diary writing around the campfire. Don’t tell their teachers but they are seriously behind with their journals. Slack parenting I reckon. Actually it’s a bit of slack parenting and also the fact that we are often spending so long in the car during the day (and the roads these last 2 weeks have been too bumpy for writing in the car) there hasn’t been much time for schoolwork. Such a lame excuse. But we are onto it now!
Even though our food supplies are seriously low, I magicked some cryovacced porterhouse steaks from the fridge and Mark cooked them over the campfire with pesto pasta, flavoured couscous and wallpaper paste mash as accompaniments. Only tinned beetroot as a veg, but that counts doesn’t it?
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