triplog

I’ve spent the last few days in limbo, otherwise known as the Gold Coast. After hanging out in Burleigh on Sunday night, I’d headed further south, all the way to Tugun (about two suburbs away), when I got a call from Keenan - I’d thought he was living somewhere just south of the border, but turns out he was one suburb back the way I’d just come, in Palm Beach. So we hung out for beers and dinner at the local surf club on Monday night - it was good to catch up, we figured out the last time we’d seen each other was around 5 years ago - then on Tuesday morning I bid him farewell and was all set to head south into NSW.

I made it as far as Tweed Heads, when the clutch on the troopy decided to give up the ghost - it had been threatening a caper like this for a while. So off I went to Keenans mechanic, Roger, where I was told I couldn’t the car back until Friday. Keenan kindly put up with me as a house guest for the rest of the week (I owe you, mate) while I waited. And waited. With no surf.

Anyway, this afternoon I finally got reunited with troopy (and dis-united from over a grand), and hit the road south. I intended to drive through Byron Bay, just to see what had changed, and then keep going further south until dark… but lo and behold, as soon as Main Beach hove into view, those plans went out the window. There was surf. My home state (sorry Jane!) had laid out the welcome mat.

I managed to keep it together long enough to snap off the pictures above, then bolted for the water. It was offshore, warm water, head high and getting glassier with each passing minute. Oh yeah…

After our stay at the Daly Waters pub, we headed onto a dirt road again - the Savannah Highway, which runs from the NT through to the Queensland east coast in Cairns. We finally crossed the border on Sunday (the 7th of September), passing from the Northern Territory into true cane toad country and the land of Four X.

We left El Questro and parted ways with Matt and Bec - they were heading straight through to Spring Creek, the camp at the turn-off to the Purnululu (Bungle Bungle) National Park, while Jane and I did a detour to have a look at Emma Gorge.

The Gorge itself was nice, ranging from an open grassland to a progressively narrower, rockier and lusher trail. It ended in a massive round pool with 50+ metre cliffs all round, and a series of long but low volume waterfalls. The water was freezing, but the best bit was that there’s a thermal (hot) spring off to the side, running down a rock alcove and into a bathtub-sized pool.

Just after leaving Emma Gorge, we came across this bushfire - it was moving towards the road pretty quickly, so we didn’t stop, just caned it through. Those black specks in the sky over the road are all hawks or eagles, swooping on smaller animals fleeing the fire.

After coming off the Gibb River Road, we developed trailer bearing trouble just at the turn-off to Kununurra; I’d used the spare a few days earlier on the right side, but the inner seal was the wrong type and I intended replacing it as soon as we got into a town - but now the left hand side bearing had gone. Since we had a lot more distance to do and were out of spares, we made the call to detour in to Kununurra to sort it out, and catch up with Matt and Bec later. Unfortunately, we got to town just as the shops were shutting, so we camped at a rest area out of town and spent the next day sorting it all out.

Quick plug here for Phil and the folks at Metaland Kununurra - extremely well-stocked parts, and friendly advice plus a hand when I couldn’t budge the old bearing cups or seat the new ones. So it took me some time, a lot of sweat and a bit of swearing plus some assistance but in the end the trailer was sitting proudly on silky smooth new bearings.

We left Kununurra in the late afternoon and headed off for Spring Creek, trying to catch up with Matt and Bec again. On the way we dropped the trailer off at Turkey Creek (Warnum) Roadhouse for safekeeping, as the road up to the Bungles is pretty rough and we thought we’d just travel light for this part of the trip. June, a nice lady who worked and lived at the roadhouse also offered to look after Janes herbs - we have 2 little planter boxes with fresh herbs.

We got to Spring Creek after dark, and camped there for the night before heading in to the Bungles the next morning.

A flight of 3 brolgas flew over our camp this morning… pretty majestic.

We left our faithful trailer behind at King Edward River as the road up to Mitchell Plateau is pretty rough… we got to the camp at Mitchell Falls around midday, cracked a beer and chilled for a while.

Mitchell Plateau and Mitchell Falls are amazing - we spent two nights up here, checking out the falls, and swimming in some magic pools and waterfalls; there’s also a tonne of Aboriginal art up here, representing a massive time span -  in some cases, a single small section of wall might have art ranging from 17,000 years ago right up to relatively recent times. That’s a mind-boggling span of time for a culture to exist continuously - think about how many other cultures or civilisations have risen and vanished within a fraction of that time.

As it happens, Jane and I didn’t take the camera on our walk out to Mitchell Falls (Matty took his), so no photos here of the falls themselves.

By the way, here’s the creek crossing I mentioned last time, on our way out back towards Kalumburu Road: