triplog

After leaving Broome, we headed out on the Great Northern Highway to get to the Gibb River Road via Tunnel Creek and the Windjana National Park, rather than do the standard Gibb RIver Road via Derby route.

Tunnel Creek is an incredible little oasis - a creek that flows through a cave system in a rock outcrop, in the middle of some very dry country (at least, until the wet season hits). Famously, it was used as a hideout for 3 years by the Aboriginal tracker/guerilla/freedom fighter Jandamarra and his followers; in the end, another Aboriginal tracker in the employ of the police shot and killed him in a gun battle at the cave entrance. There’s a whole lot of the early history of the colony that my generation never really learned - all I remember from primary school Australian history is an endless procession of ill-fated white explorers, and the woes of the convicts.

Anyway, the creek is amazing, you have to take a torch and wade through it to explore it - and there’s freshwater crocs, as we discovered when Jane nearly stepped on one!

From Tunnel Creek, we headed on to Windjana National Park, where we saw what is meant to be the highest concentration of freshwater crocs in Australia - they were everwhere. We spent the night camped in the national park and saw the most incredible moonrise.