Kununurra to El Questro, Western Australia
Whoever said that bad things come in threes didn't talk to us... for they came in fours today. Fortunately, three of them were fixed today. The fourth we'll have to live with for awhile.
Bright and early, we were up and out of the campground, driving over to the car repair place at 7. We dropped the LandCruiser off, then walked into town. Nothing was open, of course, so we went to the post office, sat down, and wrote post cards. It got hot quickly, by 8 it was already approaching 30C, so we ducked into the air conditioned Coles supermarket and just wandered the aisles aimlessly, staring at odd food products.
The similarity with American supermarket's a bit deceiving. Sure, the produce is over on one side, there's a freezer section kind of in the middle, and there's always the cereal aisle full of Kellogg's products. But there's also a bit of localization going on, too. At this Coles, the shelf-stable milk section is almost the entire side of one aisle, containing condensed milk, UHT milk, soy milk and even goats milk substitute. There's also an aisle of cordial--this is fruit drink concentrate in 2 liter jugs; you mix it with water to make drink. We're awfully fond of it, I like Dick Smith's Apple and Raspberry Diet Cordial. There are some similarities in the supermarket though--Australians like peanut butter as much as Americans, and there's always the Hallmark greeting card aisle!
And we can't explain the pricing on the plain bread rolls in the bakery section. Separately, they're 30 cents each. In a bag of six, they're $2.30. Huh? Car Repairs Done!
So we came back to the car repair shop at 9, and found the LandCruiser on the rack with its power steering hoses dangling. After a bit of investigation, the leak was found in the pressure hose leading away from the pump... and the part isn't in stock at the Toyota dealership down the road. It has to come in from Darwin, two days away, and it'll cost $680. Bugger. Or they can make us a hose. Huh? That's cool with us. So they did--the previous, crimped-ended rubber hose has been replaced by a rubber hose with two threaded fittings! It's great to see that someone, even today, retains some ad-hoc mechanical ability. And they also found our intermittent starting problem was due to worn contacts on the starter motor. So, $793 and four hours later, we were on our way.
Our first stop was Wyndham, Western Australia's northernmost port town. There's not much left there, it's all of maybe 500 people and the main street is filled with empty shopfronts. They haven't shipped anything out of there since the early 1980's, and Wyndham is a rather dusty place without much to recommend it save a lookout. The Five Rivers Lookout is on top of a 393 meter high mountain just north of town, and has great views over the bay, rivers, and surrounding countryside. There's not much around there, that's for sure!
We then backtracked aways to the Gibb River Road intersection, where we found the cyclists Regula and Stefan waiting out the heat of the day in the shade of the info board! They were pleased that we got our car fixed, and said it sounded much better! That also means that they'll definitely get food at Ellenbrae station; we'll probably drop it off tomorrow.
From there, we stopped briefly at an art site just 9km down the road, where we saw our first Windjana figure under an overhang, then we detoured off the Gibb River Road to El Questro, a million acre property that's now wholly committed to tourism.
El Questro does have five-star rooms for $1400 a night, overlooking Chamberlin Gorge, but we chose the less expensive $25 private campsite next to Pentecost River. And it was truly private, very nice. (The river, I might add, is only about five meters wide, and rocky. You can walk across it.) Forward Planning
It was in the campsite where we tried to get to grips with how we're doing the Kimberley. Some people take months to do it--that 4WD tag along tour we were on took four weeks. Frankly, though, we're getting a bit tired of 'yet another gorge', much like we got tired of 'yet another waterfall' in Queensland and 'yet another cathedral' in Europe. And the heat is bothering Chris. Yesterday, it was 34C. It's very dry, but there are also quite a lot of flies--flies that don't move if you try to shake them off. You have to actively try to swat them before they'll move.
Chris would like to get somewhere cool and pleasant with cheap motel rooms, like the southwest near Perth. That's aways away, but since we're both kinda tired of this landscape and want to see something new, we'll scoot through here somewhat quickly, getting to Broome in four days or so, then down to the mining towns of the Pilbara, before heading west to Ningaloo Reef. It'll be a bit cooler there, say in the mid twenties instead of mid thirties, and with more population there'll be more places to stay. And it's different landscape as well.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Nothing much. I think we've seen most of it around here.