End of the Gibb River Road

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Day 30 – Sunday 29^th July – Windjana Gorge to Derby

Despite being awake since 6am, it wasn’t until 8.30 until we left for the hike into Windjana Gorge. We were fortified with bacon and eggs and nutella sandwiches for breakfast. Windjana Gorge is our 8^th gorge in less than 8 days but it still managed to be completely different from all the others, and equally spectacular. Windjana is a Devonian Reef and used to be a coral reef under water, 350 million years ago. As you enter the gorge you can imagine the rock face being a mass of corals and can see the small holes in the walls that fish and eels would have hidden in all those millions of years ago. However, the best thing about the gorge is the abundance of crocodiles lounging around in the sunshine on the beaches. After we turned a couple of corners, walking along in the white sand, we spotted our first freshies! The more we looked, the more we saw. They were various sizes, from quite small to pretty big solid fellas. You could get quite close to them without them batting an eyelid! Some were floating in the water minding their own business, others were swimming lazily along the river and the rest were sunbathing. It was excellent stuff! Very kindly the crocs had positioned themselves at the start of the gorge walk so after we were all ‘croc’d-out we turned around and walked back to the campsite.

Back at the tent we put on our swimmers and shoes that could get wet and drove the 35kms to Tunnel Creek National Park. The road was pretty badly corrugated and rocky and we were glad we weren’t towing the trailer. Tunnel Creek is the oldest cave system in Australia. You can walk around 750m through the dark cave that has been cut into the cliffs by the xxx river over millions of years. The more powerful your torch the better so you can see the rock formations inside the caves (stalactites and stalacmites and bat nests etc.) You can walk upright along the river bed so claustrophobia isn’t really an issue (no squeezing through tiny gaps etc). Once you get through the tunnel to the other side there is some more aboriginal rock art to look out for as you warm yourself up in the sun again. We spent an hour there, but you could easily mess around in and out of the tunnels for a good half day. However, we were on a mission to get to Derby so drove back to Windjana, packed up the trailer and hit the road again at about 1pm.

The final stretch of the Gibb River Road was uneventful. Once we hit the bitumen we stopped and increased the tyre pressure for the sealed road, only to find that the sealed road stopped about 10ks further on. Nonetheless we knew that most of the road into Derby was sealed so just hung on in there until the bitumen road resumed.

Although supermarket shopping is normally a chore, we were looking forward to going to Woolies in Derby to stock up on food. It was like going shopping when you are hungry – you want to buy everything! But in the end we just got half a trolley of fresh food and pantry stuff for the next few days. As it is Sunday the off-licence part of the supermarket was closed but luckily we were able to pick up a slab of beer and bottle of wine at the drive-through at the Boab Inn. Austere beer and wine rationing is temporarily over!

Supermarket mission completed, we headed for the Derby wharf for sunset and on the jetty bumped into the family who we had been bumping into all along the Gibb River Road. We had last seen them at Mitchell Falls. We had arrived there a day before them yet here they were in Derby ahead of us. How could that be? It turns out they had the nightmare scenario of one of their three children getting sick up at the Mitchell Plateau and meningitis was one of the suspected diagnoses… They ended up getting the Flying Doctor service out of Mount Barnett straight to Derby hospital (Mum Brookley and 4 year old son Lucas), while the Dad Steve and two daughters had to drive back out of Mitchell Falls and meet them in the hospital. Lucas turned out to be OK. It wasn’t meningitis but maybe some insect-borne infection that had been fixed by antibiotics and a drip in the hospital. But that was their story of their expedition to the Mitchell Falls. As the sun set into the Indian ocean we treated ourselves to fish and chips from the restaurant at the end of the jetty. We had finally arrived at the West Coast of Australia!

After the sun had set we decided to go for the easy option and get a place to camp in one of the caravan parks in Derby. Managed to secure one of the final unpowered sites at the Kimberley Entrance Caravan Park, flipped open the tent and made ourselves at home for the night.

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