You can't park there!

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These were the words shrieked at us as I tentatively backed into our spot on the campsite. A pint-sized pensioner had launched herself out of her camping chair and was hurtling towards us at break-hip speed.

'You can't park there. its a bladdy driveway. Bladdy cars need to get through there!'.

Birds have taken to the sky. Some bats have woken up. Kids a few hundred yards away stop playing and run to their parents.

"Its a bladdy roadway, STOP!"

I get out and make the international gesture for its OK I mean no harm, please calm down.

"Ah I was only saying like. Bladdy driveway people have to get in there. Bladdy poms. Flaming galahs." (that last bit was made up).

The woman retreats. Birds stop their exodus and return to the branches of the trees. She goes back to her crossword and her husband, who's under the awning, looking through tinted aviators with folded arms, shaking his head.

I later discover they have "BARB & STEVE - On the road since '86 - VHF Channel 40" stenciled on the back of their caravan. Professional campers. The worst kind.

Welcome to Kununurra.

Why were we here? To see the 'Bungle Bungles'. Some of you may remember the Bungle Bungles from when Helen Daniels (Neighours) mysteriously disappeared there in 1987.

As you may recall, she met her artist friend, Frank Darcy, and almost moved there permanently. "Helen agonised over whether or not she should leave her family and friends behind for love, but eventually decided she couldn't leave Erinsborough since she was a city girl at heart, and Frank, unable to leave the country behind him, was forced to return to the Bungle Bungles alone." (Not my words, but the words of http://perfectblend.net/ )

This was not the only reason we stopped there. Bill Bryson also bangs on about them as being "an isolated sandstone massif where eons of harsh dry wind have carved the landscape into weird shapes—spindly pinnacles, acres of plump domes, wave walls... The whole extends to about a thousand square miles, yet were generally not known until the 1980s... One of the natural wonders of the world, covering an area the size of an English country... was unvisited and essentially unknown until less than twenty years ago ..."

You can drive out there but our camper wouldn't have withstood the corrugated roads. So, after I'd moved the van to allow for vehicular access, we took to the skies to have a look.

There were a few people milling around in the office at the airstrip- not least a party of 6 Aussies, all together on holiday. Two of the party were told they were on a different plane, and wouldn't be with their other four mates.

A lot of muttering and tutting followed, with threats of mutiny.

"We booked together. There must have been a bladdy mistake. We should all be together."

One of them plucked up the courage to raise this with the pilot on the short walk out to the plane.

Without any diplomacy whatsoever, he replied "Yeah love, it's all done on weight. You're all quite big and there might have been a problem if you'd all been in the one plane. I can show you the spreadsheet if you like". Silence. Not a peep out of them the rest of the flight. Brilliant.

Look at the pics - the flight was amazing. Too much for our tiny minds to take in. Huge rocks, huge chasms, huge everything.

Helen should have gone.

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