Day 33 and 34: Bungles in the Bungle Bungles

So I am not going to belabour this point more than ONE paragraph – be warned it will be a long one -  but I do want to say that ..... I HATE ROUGH CAMPING!  Everyone who knows me knows I hate it and once again I have proved to myself why I hate it.  Let me list the whys ....... it is dirty – everything gets dirty all the time.  You have to bend over constantly to get stuff out, put stuff away, get into bed, get out of bed, wash dishes, dry dishes (even though the husband, desperate to help her like it, is compensating by doing all the cooking and washing).  You have to do lots of domestic jobs like cooking dinner in the dark (Rich did this), which means catastrophies like cutting your finger when you are doing the salad (Rich offered the head torch but it was turned down), spraying fly spray into the pan instead of oil spray (yes, that really happened – and Rich did not do this – again no headlamp torch so the fly spray looked like the cooking spray).  You have to wear an unattractive contraption on your head that has a torch attached to it and in my case it makes your ears stick out further than they already do (Now we know why she chooses not to wear it – vanity!).  You have to sleep on a blow up mattress that inevitably goes down in the night (in our case Rich only packed one single bed blow up mattress so he got to sleep on the tarp but that is probably not such a bad thing because I am sure that by the morning I will be sleeping on a mattress with no air in! Oh yea of little faith, what about Rich paying for his sins for leaving the extra camp bed behind and sleeping on the hard floor – don’t worry, I am tough)  You have to go to the toilet in stinky drop dunnies ...with frogs in them  or ... and there IS a choice, sneak around to find a tree – and I will not go into gory details of the hazards that THAT entails (except this is where blokes do have an advantage).  There are no showers so you have to do it the Mexican way – and again, to protect sensibilities, I will not go into those gory details (Rich rigged up a camp shower with warm water, hanging from a tree and had a great shower after dark {so the other campers could not see}).  You get to store your cold food in a cool box (eski) in ice, which seems like a great idea until it melts and your yogurt ends up with a two centimetre deep layer of ice water with bits of lettuce floating in it.  And I haven’t even got to the lack of hairdryer yet, but I did say I would not belabour the point, so what I will go on to tell you about is the beautiful Bungles (and I don’t mean forgetting the pegs for the tent (which was easily worked out by cutting wooden ones from local trees), the extra blow up mattress (ok that was hard) or the fly spray fiasco (that was seriously funny but I had no one to share the joke)) but the stunning rock formations that we saw today. So all in all you get the picture – Kim hates camping and nothing will fix that, while Rich simply loves camping and the rougher the better. Here we sit under a clear, warm, bright moonlit and starry night, sitting outside our tent, with a warm breeze blowing, no mozzies.... Ah such is life!

So we left Fitzroy Crossing and drove for quite a while – watching the countryside turn ever more lovely – the Kimberleys are greener than I expected with lots of rocky outcrops to start with, that gave way eventually to huge ridges of red rock.  People always talk about the stunning colours of the Kimberleys, the blue sky, red rock and sand and green vegetation – well they are all true – really the colours are probably the best thing about it all.  We free camped overnight at a lovely little river and then early this morning, got up and headed fifty kms past the Bungle Bungles turnoff to a place called Turkey Creek where we left our van in a locked compound (and paid $1.81 for diesel).  Back to the turnoff, and down the road into the Bungle Bungles which is too rough for a single axel van like ours, so it is rough camping all the way – and I ... oh yes, I have had my say already about that! 

 The road in was rough – fifty kilometres of it that took us an hour and a half, but of course Rich was in his element, loving every minute of it – there were even a few river crossings – nothing too deep, but enough for a little tingle down the spine and water up the doors.  The scenery grew steadily more enchanting – more and more magnificence in terms of the ridges and cliffs.  We finally got into the national park and found our camp ground and set up our tent (minus the tent pegs and discovering only one mattress) and quickly set off for the first walk of the day ... the Echidna Chasm – wow!  It was mind blowing.  See the photos – almost worth the hateful rough camping (take your choice girl – you can’t have both).  From there it was on to another walk, the Mini Palms Gorge, which Rich did on his own, and whilst not quite as awesome (and I use this word in the true sense – not the teenybopper sense) was still really lovely.

We watched the sun go down backwards (us – not the sun) because the way to do it in the Bungle Bungles is to go to the Lookout (on a high ridge) facing the beautiful walls of the Bungle Bungle Range and with your back to the sun, and then as it goes down, witness the gorgeous array of colours on the Bungle Bungle Walls.  It was just as stunning as promised and rather novel way of ‘watching the sun go down’.

Rich’s highlight:    The flyspray instead of the oil spray fiasco (Not really)

 My highlight:    The Echidna Chasm and meeting in it some neighbours from Warragul, Carol and Russel Monson – literally, they live 500 meters down the road from us in Warragul and we bump into them on a walking track in the far north of Australia!  Go figure.

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