Gibb River Road

Cows at El Questro. Moo!
Lake Argyle
Pentecost River Crossing, Gibb River Road
Mitch and Bob in the back of a pickup getting a ride to Ellenbrae after blowing two tires



First of all, I would like to apologize to my thousands of followers for not updating my blog very often in the last month. Unbeknownst to Apple, Inc., wireless internet and 3G is a luxury, and not easy to come by in many parts of the world. After my last post on July 14th, i left for the Gibb River Road. This trip consisted of three weeks of camping in one of the unexplored frontiers, known as the Kimberley. Going into this trip, I really wasn't sure what to expect. I didn't know much about the Kimberley. I had images of flat, red dirt, probably because that is where i just came from in the "Red Center" (Uluru). However, I discovered that it is quite mountainous, even if the mountains do not reach higher than 1000 feet, and the climate is dry and tropical. The total kms surpassed 3,000- Jabiru to Broome and back. We took the dirt Gibb River Road East to Broome, and then took the paved Great Northern Highway from Broome to Jabiru. It took us about 2 weeks to trek the Gibb, and 2 days to make it back on the Great Northern Highway.

Because it would take forever to tell you every little detail, I will give you my favorite parts. On the second driving day, we had fish and chips in a little shack in Wyndhym. It's a very small town with a really cute town museum. Most of the information in the museum was handwritten, I'm guessing by the nice old woman who worked the counter, and who was most likely alive when the town was booming in 1886. Anyways, I read an amusing story about two German pilots who crashed in the outback in the early 1900's. The two pilots left their plane, and thought that by walking they would run into a town or a person or SOMETHING. Clearly, this was their first visit. They saw an aboriginal man who stared at them, but then turn and ran the other way. They assumed that he was going to alert civilization about their arrival. Bad move. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember that they decided to swim across a river, and turned back when they saw that crocodiles were swiftly approaching, popped their life raft, and one of them threw the one gun that they had in the river in what sounds like a rather dramatic gesture. They wandered for weeks without food, until, on the brink of death, they were lying in a cave and saw another aboriginal walking by with quite a few fish on his spear. The aboriginal saw them and helped them out, because that's what you do when you come across people are totally SCREWED in the Kimberley (which I'll expand on later). Meanwhile, another aboriginal had found one of the pilots' initilialed cigarette case, which he had dropped in his frantic escape from the crocs, which alerted the community that the two pilots from the plane that had gone down were wandering around. Cue rescue mission. And they were saved! I liked the dramatic gun disposal- I imagine the gun really could have helped with the food bit.

Next favorite: ELQ- that's the trendy abbrev. for El Questro. El Questro has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the northwest because it is very touristy, but it actually does have a ton of things to do and you get your money's worth. We stayed two nights and did some fun hikes, and also put the land rover to the test on a steep and rocky climb. After we put the Landy to the test, I was put to the test and nearly died trying to scale a rock wall to go fishing for a whopping 20 minutes. And didn't catch anything.

After we left ELQ, we popped two tires in about 50 kms, and rolled into Ellenbrae Station. It just so happened that on our way in, a friendly German was on his way out after seriously screwing up his tires (I'm not sure of the exact lingo, so i'm not going to go into detail, but basically, he really screwed it up). His Mitsubishi was being towed out and taken to Kununurra, and Bob, in a rather bold gesture, asked him if he would mind taking in one of the wheel to replace the tires. The German, being a good bloke and really feeling the comradery of being screwed in the middle of no where and having to help your fellow travelers, obliged. While he was making his way to Kununurra, the three musketeers were being majorly guilt-tripped by the oldies running the Ellenbrae station. Needless to say, we were pretty excited when the tire came back the next day and we were on our way! Changes from then on included lower tire pressure and driving slower.

My next favorite spot was Tunnel Creek. Tunnel Creek is a cave about 60 kms south of the Gibb River Road, and is the site of a 375 million year old Devonian Reef. The Reef was buried and preserved, resurfaced, and is now a tourist trap! We walked through the cave for 1 km, saw a ton of bats, an eel, and you can see the fossils of ancient reef, so I loved it.

Broome

Broome was gorgeous. Lots of pearls. Apparently, I'm the only decent fisherman out of the three of us because I caught all the fish.

We spent two full days of driving along the Great Northern Highway, and I spent another 10 days relaxing, fishing, and hiking. After a long trip to Nice, France, I finally met up with Michelle!

Hey which way?

Uluru. Ayer's Rock. One in the same. It's the picture that you will undoubtedly see when you go to Outback Steakhouse. But, unlike Outback Steakhouse, it is actually really incredible. (Side note- I have yet to come across the elusive "bloomin' onion". Apparently, they are not found much in the wild these days).

Back to the story. So as you come to Uluru National Park (or whatever it's called, can't quite remember but Uluru is in it), you will see many signs discouraging climbing Uluru. It is a sacred Aboriginal site. At first, I thought I wouldn't climb it because it would be disrespectful, but once I got pretty close to it, I discovered that not only was there a chain to aid in the climbing, but instructions on the best way to climb (drink a litre of water an hour, wear rubber-soled shoes, sunscreen, hat, blah blah blah). Furthermore, there is talk of closing the climb down because one bad exotic apple had to do a strip tease on the top of it (also, 35 people have died climbing it). So, I went for it.

Hannah ran into a little bit of trouble wearing UGG boots and a mini skirt, and turned around nearly half way up. Unbeknownst to her or the rest of us, this was actually the hardest part. The second half is not nearly as steep. Terry, being such a nice guy, walked her all the way down and then went all the way back up again...in slippers.

This is a German cool cat that I saw sprinting past me on the way up in his button down, sweater vest, skinny jeans, and, of course, wayfarers.

The hike took us about 2 hours, and we all made it alive, except for the group water bottle which I dropped in the first 20 minutes. God rest its soul.

Driving to the Kata tjutas, or the Olgas, we came across some camels. I was pretty excited about this. You american readers out there may not know this (I didn't), but there are actually more camels in Australia than there are in Arab countries. In fact, Australia exports live camels to Saudi Arabia. Ha!

We took a quick look at the Olgas and moved on because we were pretty whipped from climbing Uluru. We camped just south of Alice Springs, hoping to get work as carnies at the Alice Springs Carnival. Unfortunately, there was not enough work so the next day Tannah and Milly (Terry and Hannah and Mitch and Kelly, collectively), had to part ways. :(

Mitch and I stopped at Daly Waters for the "famous burgers" that Lonely Planet talked about. This is when I began to start wondering if Lonely Planet writers actually went to the places they wrote about. Here is a picture of a lorikeet at Daly Waters.

When we got to Pine Creek, an old gold mining town, we had some Coopers at the hotel-motel (which lonely planet hardly mentioned), and then checked out the lonely planet favorite- an overpriced flashy backpackers which lacked any tap beer. gross. We tried camping at the Roadhouse, but there was absolutely no wind and the mosquitoes kept buzzing in our ears so we couldn't sleep a wink. We packed up at 2 am and decided to drive straight through to Jabiru.

dry as a dingo's paw

At the moment, I am in Jabiru, NT, Australia, at Mitch's crib. We got here a few days ago after our trip from Townsville to Uluru and up to the NT. If you would like to see where I have stopped along the trip, this link-http://www.spotadventures.com/user/profile?user_id=57493- will take you to a google map with all the spots on it!So, Mitch and I left Friday, June 25th and headed west. We camped a few hundred kms from Townsville. A little tentative to use the toilets at first, we eventually discovered there were not actuallybees in the toilets...

We met up with Terry and Hannah the next morning at our campsite. We made it to Mt. Isa that night, and were forced to stay because of car trouble. Some scenery of Queensland outback...

After we had the break pads tightly screwed on (phew), we continued on.

We stopped at Camooweal for a little R&

R, but timing is everything, and the police happened to drive behind terry's unregistered car. Terry, the prince of Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, is a nice guy, but he either has no need for legitimate license plates in the islands, or remains on "island time", and couldn't pencil in the time to get one. Fortunately, the policewoman was very nice, and let us go as long as Terry pinkie-promised to get a license plate ASAP. Naturally, we got right on that.

Camooweal is also where Queensland ends and the Northern Territory begins. According to Mitch, an NT resident (which explains a lot), NT also stands for "Not today, not tomorrow." I didn't really believe him until I saw my first territorian. I wish I had a picture but I was absolutely terrified to shove a Nikon in his face and ask for his picture, considering he was almost 7 feet tall, wearing a shirt that said "If you don't like me, then fuck you", and had on ridiculously short shorts and boots.

We stopped at the Barkley Homestead just before dust, and got to meet Cocky, who apparently bites. After some good arguing about a campsite, we finally settled on one just off the road, a little bit past the Barkley.

The next morning, we left quite early and made it all the way to the Barrow Creek. On the way, we stopped in Tennant Creek and Ti-Tree. Not much to them, just little gas stations along the way. Plenty of people and dogs hanging about, both drinking green cans.

That night, we camped just before Barrow Creek and climbed this little plateau and watched the sunset. It was a little steeper than I had hoped, and I drank a tad too much wine at the top, which made getting down interesting. No broken bones, though. Shocker. (Not that kind, Katherine)

The next day, we went to Alice springs and stayed at Annie's Place, some hip and edgy backpackers. We ended up staying two nights there because of the weather and what-not. We got to see a show outside of the grocery store on our first day. Some girls were brawling in the middle of the street. One girl was curled up in a ball on the curb, and another girl was kicking the shit out of her. Everyone just stared, including me. Weird-for me at least- but alice springs in the stabbing capital of the world. "Little stab, one time". This was the court statement of an aboriginal man who accidently stabbed his wife to death. Apparently, little stabs are common in the aboriginal culture. But this poor fellow happened to stab his wife in the wrong place and she died from only one little knife jab. To all those one-time stabbers out there, be warned.

That's a lot for one time, so I'll continue tomorrow with our journey to uluru and up to Jabiru, the heart of kakadu!

Townsville: Take 2

Dear family and friends,

I apologize for leaving you so soon, but I am an unemployed post-graduate so I have to do something with my time, although I did enjoy being a "lady of leisure" for three weeks.

I got to Townsville a few days ago. For those of you who don't know, Townsville, Australia, is a town on the Northeast coast of Queensland, home to James Cook University, and, currently, me. It's been interesting, and a little weird, to be back here a second time. I have spent the last few days drinking margaritas and adjusting to Australian things, like time zones, bitter beers, Mitch's "Australian temper", housemates that clearly have never heard the word "courtesy" before, Russell Crowe (I wish), and learning to drive stick shift (sorry about your transmission, Ken, but thanks for letting me use your car).

I'll be leaving for the so-called "Bush" in about a week. Mitch, Terry, Terry's girlfriend, Hannah, and I will be driving to Uluru (Ayr Rock, for those politically insensitive folk) and then to dabiru (or Jabiru, if you are not drunk Mitch). We'll be stopping places along the way, but I'll keep you up to date when that happens.

Cheers!