East Kimberley
Friday, May 18, 2018
We flew 454 miles/730 kilometers from Broome to Kununurra and arrived late in the afternoon on Friday.
The next morning, we drove to the Bungle Bungle Wilderness Lodge (tent camp) in Purnululu National Park. We will spend two nights there.
The trip was about two hours on good paved highways, then unsealed roads, including a 53 kilometer road to the visitor center from the Great Northern Highway. All the guidebooks and our hotel advised 5–6 hours, including 2–3 hours to cover the 53 km stretch. Our GPS said the drive would take 12 hours! It did not. There were also warnings about stream crossings. We were lucky that the only streams were very, very low, and produced no issues. We were able to cover the 53 km in about 1:20 going at a safe speed. Finally, there were only two potential stops for supplies, etc. along the way, both on the Great Northern Highway, the larger of which was the small aboriginal community of Warmun with its “road house.” Having supplies and managing fuel use was critical.
If you double click on the map, it will expand to show the area of the park (south of Kununurra and north of Halls Creek).
We are here in Purnululu (a UNESCO World Heritage site) to walk on trails and to enjoy the spectacular scenery of the Bungle Bungles (“bee hive” rock formations.
We took several walks, such as to Cathedral Gorge, during our visit.
Here is a photo taken inside Cathedral Gorge.
On Sunday we drove up to Echidna Chasm and walked towards the mountains, through palm trees.
The Chasm is remarkable—the walls are close together and quite high. If you look closely, you’ll see a person at the bottom of the chasm; the scale is fantastic. The chasm lights up like this for a few minutes every day when the sun is in the right position.
On Monday, we drove north, back to Kununurra. Tuesday morning, we had another airplane tour of the area, with a focus on the coast and two areas with waterfalls. Here is the area of Mitchell Falls in the Mitchell River National Park; the falls are marked with a red arrow.
Mitchell Falls are shown here.
Our plane landed at Kalumburu, the northern most city in Western Australia. We had a look around the Mission Museum and visited the Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church, built in 1908. If you expand the map, you can see the small village.
Afterwards, we flew to the second blue waterfall marker on the map (King George Falls) and then around the coast, up the Ord River Valley, and then back to Kununurra.
After another night in Kununurra, we drove in our four wheel drive, high–clearance rental truck on Wednesday morning in a westerly direction to El Questro Wilderness Park (green house pin on the map). We will be staying in the Park for two nights.
We have, so far, had luck in not having to deal with big river crossings with our trucks. That’s in part because this is the dry season. (We rented our current vehicle from Thrifty, and “Thrifty” was painted in very large blue letters on the side of the white truck—we always knew which truck was ours.)
Here is the famous Pentecost River auto crossing (no bridge), which we saw from yesterday’s airplane tour. If you look closely, you may see a truck on the near side of the river just starting to cross!
We did a hike in El Questro Gorge where the trail was along the bed of a creek; there were a lot of palm trees and ferns.
In the late afternoon on Wednesday, we took a tour along the Chamberlain River. The rock walls are high and impressive. We came across a rock hopping wallaby, fairly high up on one of the walls.
Back at our lodge, we enjoyed the sunset.
On Thursday morning, we took a “bush tour” in a small safari truck. Our guide stopped every so often to explain what we were seeing. These trees (“boab”) are really huge! Our truck is shown for scale.
On the bush tour, we learned about how the Aboriginals used native plants. Here, our ranger talked about the uses of this particular tree.
Our next activity was a short walk to Zebedee Thermal Springs and a warm water soak. This is about the only spot without crocodiles!
After the hike and soak, we packed up for tomorrow’s drive back to Kununurra and the airplane trip up to Darwin, in the Northern Territory.
We flew from Broome to Kununurra, rented a sturdy, high–clearance four wheel drive truck, and worked our way over to Purnululu National Park. We also will take an air tour to look at waterfalls and the northern coast. Our next stop will be at El Questro, and after two nights there, we will drive back to Kununurra for a flight to Darwin, in the Northern Territory.
