If the essence of Australia could be condensed into the experiences of just one region then my time in and around the town of Kununurra, in the far North West would be it for me! This area has so much potential and as a casual visitor I'm sure I've only scratched the surface - a hugely cheering realisation in itself! It's got all the essential elements that I treasure about Australia: vast empty tracts of wonderful landscapes rendered in nature's vibrant primary colours of yellow grasses, red earth and blue sky, dramatic gorges and waterfalls with endless opportunity for adventurous exploration, fascinating otherworldly trees and creatures, all perfectly adapted to life in this harsh environment, and many days crowned by bush camping with all the allure of a campfire and sleeping under the stars.

We rolled into Kununurra today after a 3-day bitumen drive north from Broome, the only blip on an otherwise mundane journey being when we stopped by a roadside wind pump this morning for a welcome freshen-up scrub from its overflow pipe before hitting town.

We’re hoping for some work to bolster our funds and Kununurra is one of the best places in Australia to find it: It’s a big fruit and vegetable growing centre, surprising seeing as it is slap bang in the middle of a huge arid region covering thousands of square kilometres. The Ord River Irrigation scheme makes all this agriculture possible with two dams and a huge catchment area that includes Lake Argyle (five to twenty times the size of Sydney Harbour, depending on season) and the flooded stretch of the Ord between the dams (a three day canoe jaunt we were later to discover), storing enough water to provide a reliable year long supply to all the plantations.                                        Irrigation Channel, Kununurra

Bush Shower

Boab tree guitar stop en route to Kununurra

An hour later we sat on the warm grass outside our tents in the dappled sunshine, happy new residents at Town Caravan Park. Camping is much better anyway: you’re so much more in tune with the land, and that’s a key part of what this trip is all about for me – so I’m glad that things worked out as they did. This evening we discovered a novel bonus: our camping area is a roost for flying foxes. Sweet! This is the first time I’ve seen these attractively featured creatures with their large furry faces, well-developed eyes and three to four foot wingspans. Endearingly gregarious, their musical chattering provided a background score (though some said 'raucous infernal din') to campground conversation and we whiled away our first evening around the campsite, swapping yarns with our neighbours, many of whom were backpackers working already.

26 June – Lost in Hidden Valley
Following some unsuccessful job-hunting yesterday and a leisurely start to today, I suggested we go explore the surrounding area a little, so as not to waste the entire day. First stop was Hidden Valley on the edge of town, and later, just in time for sunset and no more as it happened, a climb to the top of “Kelly’s Knob”, a sandstone hill behind the town, for a memorable view out over the surrounding countryside.

Hidden Valley: Shaun & Dave sword-fencing with spear grass in the background, ever patient for me & my camera

Living up to its name, Hidden Valley was somewhat elusive and we drove past the entrance to it a couple of times before spotting a small sign, screened by bush so that it was only readable from the opposite direction we'd approached from - some town planner's idea of economy perhaps. We clambered around in Hidden Valley for some time then climbed a path to a rocky outcrop that ended in a cliff, where we hung out, just savouring the serenity from our elevated perch. After a while Dave and Shaun headed back down into the valley but I lingered another 10 minutes, then after strolling out along a ridge to check out photo potential, found an interesting looking alternate route down and descended that way. After 20 or 30 minutes brisk scrambling around the valley walls, over tumbledown rock faces and ledges, turning this way and that, steered by curiosity and being constantly jabbed in the legs by spinifex grass, I realised that I now had no idea where I was.My meandering route had left me completely disoriented. Nothing looked familiar and the valley seemed completely devoid of life. Realisation dawned with some embarrassment: I was lost.

Hidden Valley: What a spot for a picnic!

A Chance Encounter
Then something unexpected happened. As I sat on a knee-high boulder to catch my breath and scan the valley rim for familiar rock formations, a little wallaby bounced up and around the corner, through a gap in the rocks a few metres ahead and to my right. He froze and looked straight at me. For a long moment we both gazed at each other, motionless, breath held. He was caught between timid curiosity and panicked flight but while I remained motionless he teetered. I couldn’t move, at least not without forcing his hand, but the photo would have been a beaut’ had I been able to reach for my camera: He was half lit in the warm, slanting evening sun, framed by tall vertical rock at either side. In the end I couldn’t contain myself and smiling widely said “G’day mate!” His big feet scuffed a shower of gravel across the ground and a little puff of red dust into the air as he bolted. The warm rays of late evening sun illuminated the swirling particles of dust against a dark shadowy rock face behind, slowly dissolving like a fade-out at the end of a movie. As if nothing had happened, all seemed serene again and if I had to sleep the night out here it was good to know that at least all the locals weren’t lethal.

After about an hour, having scaled numerous craggy valley-walls and near vertical cliffs, legs feeling leaden, I recognised a distant rocky stack in silhouette, which with great relief gave me a bearing to work from. It turned out I had been in the fifth valley beyond the one we had started in. As I negotiated my way down yet another cliff, a somewhat surprised local man who’d been out walking the marked path with his wife, spotted me and shouted up from 50 feet below “Is there a path way up there?” to which I joked “I’m an advance scout for the Department of Conservation. I'm just making a new one but it’ll be a while before it’s opened to the public!” , as I carefully picked out hand and foot holds on my descent towards the valley floor. Dave and Shaun waited patiently at the van and we set off to climb the town’s quirkily named hill – Kelly’s Knob.

Upon reaching the foot of Kelly’s Knob we couldn’t find a path and the ¹bushman’s clock said 30 minutes to sunset, so there was no time to spare. Undaunted we forced a path across a scorched and fire blackened stony landscape to a steep rock face that dropped about 15 feet. I clambered down to a little cleft, similarly soot blackened, then across and up another rock face of about 40 feet on the other side, emerging onto the marked path. When we reached the summit we noticed that we were the only intrepid conquerors to be covered with black soot. Maybe we should have spent more than 8 seconds looking for the path, though as always we all enjoyed our mini adventure, even if we did look like end-of-shift coal miners! We lingered for some time, looking out over the countryside, enjoying the serenity and watching the changing colours in the sky as sunset deepened into dusk and stars began to prick faintly through the darkening canopy above, each of us adrift in our own private reverie.

[NB: ¹Bushman’s clock is a simple but surprisingly accurate way to tell how much time there is before sunset: Hold your hand at arm’s length in front of you with your fingers running horizontal and see how many fingers fit between the horizon and the base of the sun. Each finger represents 15 minutes daylight remaining]

Day's end from Kelly's Knob

28-June
Several days ago I had ‘phoned a banana plantation. They'd said they may have a few days' work for two or three people. So I called one of the owners again today as arranged and he’s able to take all three of us on, starting next week. With luck we may get more than those few days once we get established.

29-June - A Dawn Walkabout in Kununurra
I awoke at 03:38 this morning to the crow of a cockerel of all things. I hadn’t expected to hear the familiar sounds of rural Ireland in the heart of the Kimberley. I wasn’t at all tired, just a little warm, so I got up and ‘phoned my family and several different friends from a nearby payphone. Hearing familiar voices and accents transported me from the pre-dawn gloom of a lonely payphone outside the slumbering quiet of Town Caravan Park on the outskirts of Kununurra, into the company of friends and the familiar, ten thousand miles and half a world away.

I returned to my tent and lay outside for a half hour watching the stars but there wasn’t much going on – only two shooters in all that time, so I decided to go for a walk to see what was about. I left the campsite at 5am and wandered around until 7:45. My mini-walkabout turned out to be supremely satisfying. I saw the sun rise over the nearby ranges and just as it did a small plane flew right over me on its ascent from the nearby airfield. As he passed close overhead the warm early morning sun painted the underside of his craft in a silky sheen of golden creamy light, and I couldn’t help wonder where he might be off to and how different Kununurra looked from up there at this magical early hour, the slanting sunlight revealing every crease in the landscape.

A little further on I spotted some hairy caterpillars wriggling along a footpath near the base of a tree in comic rippling procession. There were quite a few about, strung out in a long line down the path. Just as a flicker of recognition began to form in my mind, two more caterpillars bounced in quick succession onto the path at my feet: literally bounced, as if from a great height! Remembering an episode of Bush Tucker Man, I looked up high into the tree and there it was - their nest. Itchy caterpillars, he’d called them and said they were terrible things and should be avoided at all costs.

Their hollow hairs acted like hypodermic syringes, injecting a highly unpleasant itching irritant into the flesh of anything or anyone green enough to touch them. I’d remembered that good old Les had told me (and everyone else watching, I suppose) that when times were hard and food scarce, Aboriginals found a use even for these: They would get that nest and cook it up quickly on some embers and eat the poached residents. I suppose the heat removed the hairs and made this possible. The two recently fallen caterpillars lay tightly curled, stunned and motionless for about 15 seconds then slowly unfurled, oriented themselves, and wriggled off along the same trail as the others stretched out ahead of them, the whole procession moving like a disjointed Mexican wave. This early morning solitude gave me space to think of a few ideas for photos and as I went over these I came upon a fire danger indicator, which I’d been on the lookout for to compliment the bush fire photo I’d taken a few weeks earlier when we’d driven through a bushfire near Port Hedland. On my way back I took time out to go into macro mode (a photographic term for real close-up) and got down to termite eye-level to watch them scurrying here and there and doing their little termite chores. I was kneeling at the entrance to a termite burrow – just a small hole in the red sand when, after a few seconds this big freak-of-nature termite, about three times the size of the others, appeared, to check me out. I reckoned he must be the bouncer and specially bred and fed for the task. Curious to test my theory I stopped at several other entrances on my way back to the campground. Each time, within 10 seconds of my arriving, one of these big suckers would appear! Alas my camera won’t go close enough for a pic.

I don’t know that you could call termites cute but I liked their pin-prick dot eyes, pleasant colouring and the way they had a little chatter to each other as they passed. All in all a most excellent morning’s outing! I returned to the campsite as its residents had begun to stir. A few campers scuffed to and from the shower block on flip-flops (called "thongs" here). Others stood around sleepily outside their tents and stretched and yawned. A campstove billy languidly chuffed steam from below its lid into the early morning sunlight. Throughout the scene there was a pervading hypnotic lack of haste that made me smile with satisfaction. this was how life should be - leisurely.

05-July
For the past week we’ve been working on a banana plantation, getting up at 5am to drive the 25km in time for a 6am start. It’s quite chilly at this early hour and we count ourselves lucky to have our own transport. The alternative for many fruit pickers from our campsite is a lift on the back of a flatbed truck – a miserable looking bone-chilling journey as many pickers sit huddled together for warmth, dressed in attire appropriate to a day’s fruit picking in the sun, but woefully inadequate for this wind-blasted pre-dawn journey.

It has been tough, intensive manual work most of every day but the folk we are working with and for are fun and a decent bunch and the work is so different from anything any of us have ever done before as to be novel, interesting and even enjoyable. Our first two days were the worst. We were digging out trees in an old block of the plantation using these killer spades, which weighed probably 20 pounds, and at 6 feet long and made of thick steel were a job to carry around all day in the heat, let alone throwing them constantly down with enough force to sever the tendrils and roots that spread out all around the base of the trees, then wrestle free from the sucking mud, first the spade, time and time again, then each tree root, heavy and clogged with dirt, to manhandle them into a wheelbarrow. With sharp machetes strung at our belts and 2 inches of mud clinging to our boots we’d then slip and slither over huge wet banana leaves, battling our way over the rough muddy terrain to the end of the block, to dump the roots there for collection and processing later. The trunks were chopped into manageable lengths for dumping. By the end of that first week we had dug out, chopped up, sectioned roots, dipped and treated the eyes for replanting, chipped (weeding with a hoe), planted, shovelled and trimmed. We felt like old hands and indeed so did our hands, which were thick and blistered, and had become about as dexterous as a bunch of bananas!

Herman checking for breaks in the sprinkler hoses after a day's ploughing and planting

On our first day we’d been introduced to everyone at the plantation and I knew I was sure to forget some names. When we met the joint owner, Herman, I was strongly reminded of Bernhard Langer, the German golfing ace, and so remembered him to myself as “Herman the German”, not at all in any derogatory way of course, just trying one of those memory assosciation tricks. I mentioned this to Dave and Shaun one evening around the campsite, and then Shaun at one point on day three, when he was talking to Herman, began to recount stories of teasing the German kids when he was at school there when his dad was in the army. Someone in the group warned Shaun that he could be skating on thin ice talking about teasing Germans to a bloke with such an obvious German name. Herman, in uncharacteristically boisterous mood, leaned forward with high-eyebrowed enthusiasm and added eagerly, “Yeah, do you want to know what my surname is?” to which Shaun turned an impish grin, leaned forward to mirror Herman, raised his eyebrows with equal enthusiasm and with a little shake of his head said “Nope!” Back at our campsite later that evening we were enjoying the memory of the incident, wondering what Herman’s surname had been, when Shaun said, “I should have said, ‘Is it… The-German?’ ” So that’s why I haven’t written any journal entries in a while. We’ve been getting up at 5am, getting back to Kununurra by 5pm, getting in some chocolate milk (which we've all become hooked on) and groceries for dinner and lunches, then it’s back to the campsite for a 20 minute queue for a 20-plus minute shower, scrubbing our skin raw to try to coax out the dirt and ground-in mud and tree sap. Then we cook dinner, eat dinner, clean up and make sandwiches and orange cordial for the morning, and by then it’s too dark to write anyway and more or less time to hit the hay.

Tip: Exhaustive research of all the different cordial flavours in the local supermarket revealed orange to be best for all day drinking as it was about the only one that was still tasty after the sun had heated it all day long.

Ballistic Spudguns
At the banana plantation over the first week the crew had occasionally made reference to a “spud gun”. Each time it was mentioned the regular crew would descend into hearty laughter while Dave & Shaun and I would just look at each other mystified as to what was so amusing. On Thursday we discovered what it was! There are lots of designs that would work but this one was about 2½ feet long, with a plastic barrel and breech made from various plumbing bits and pieces, with a screw-off blanking cap at the end of the breech, into which was cemented the piezo sparking starter unit for a gas barbeque. It works as follows: Unscrew the base plate and squirt a couple of seconds of quick start, WD40 or hairspray into the breech to form an explosive aerosol suspension and connect it all up again; Force a large potato down the barrel (best if it’s slightly oversized as the stripping of the skin forms a better gas-tight seal between starchy potato and plastic barrel). Point it in a safe direction and with the palm of your hand, hit the barbeque starter unit in the cap to produce a spark which ignites the explosive mixture… and WHOOOOMP, the potato is blasted out at high speed, flying out over the plantation and covering 100 yards or more – pretty impressive! The blokes at the plantation were disappointed though because in the event they couldn’t find a potato for our demo and it was a large apple we had used instead: They said a potato goes much further!

15-July
Well we ended up getting nearly 2 weeks work at Bonza Bananas that first session: a welcome bolster to our travel funds as well as it being a thoroughly enjoyable and personally rewarding experience. On those two weeks we encountered many beasties. Some were common and innocuous like the blue tongued lizards and other smaller lizards, some more dangerous like the frequent snake sightings, some were cute like the bright green tree frogs that lived down the middle of the banana trees and with their little sucker feet were just as likely to jump onto your leg as onto the trunk of a banana tree. But some deserve more detailed mention. First were the four inch wide, solid-bodied, thick legged spiders (Huntsmans), who were masters of disguise, which I discovered on our second day digging up old trees. I put my hand on top of a cut off tree to dislodge it when Shaun casually said “Look out for that huge hideous hairy spider right beside your hand!” I looked for a few long seconds before its shape suddenly materialised in front of me, about an inch from my left hand. I had thought Shaun was kidding so I’d been playing it cool, leaving my hand where it was; that was until I saw the size of the sucker, when I yanked my hand away reflexively, skin prickling in horror. After another few seconds I had regained my composure and decided to satisfy my curiosity about the spider. They were renowned more for their menacing appearance and size than their posing any real danger to people. Only a few of the Huntsman species were venomous and those only mildly so. They were reputedly aggressive though, so this was the basis of my curiosity.

Feeling reasonably secure behind thick rubber gloves I gently prodded the spider’s legs until it clumped off down the tree shoot. I then put my hand in its path and nudged it gently back up again, then down again and up again... and was about to nudge it down again, but by this stage the spider had had enough! As I stretched a finger out to send him down the tree, he reared up, latching onto my fingertip with his two front legs and was about, no doubt, to sink his glistening fangs into my soft pink flesh, when I lost my cool again and tugged my finger out of his death-grip; then watched horrified afresh as to my shock he leapt about a foot straight out from the tree before gravity carried him in a graceful arc towards earth. A menacing blur too close to focus on, he went sailing past my well-within-range face which had been studying the proceedings in macro mode, trying to count his eyes and idly wondering if spiders had eyebrows (like birds have eyelashes!), and scarpered into the leaf litter that perfectly matched his colouring. I had completely forgotten about this emergency escape mechanism that many spiders have to evade potential predators!

Snakes & Spiders loved to lurk in this lovely leaf litter

Mysterious Creatures
A couple of days later Dave and Shaun and I were weeding a block right out on the edge of the plantation when we spotted this little lizard with a curious spiky tail – almost like rose thorns. Keen as ever to meet the locals I gently scooped him up with a gloved hand: he was only 5 or 6 inches long and looked friendly enough! His tail spikes had an odd semi-gloss sheen that made it difficult to tell visually whether they were soft and rubbery or chitinous and brittle, so I touched the side of one to find out. To our amazement the spikes slowly receded, piston-like into the tail until almost flush, then suddenly recoiled outwards, spurting a dark, glue like, presumably noxious gunk in a series of little jets, which obvious act of distress secured his early release back into the field. Later on, when I described him to the blokes from the plantation who had lived in the area all their lives, with supplementary detail offered by Shaun and Dave, they shook their heads perplexed, offering no idea as to what it might have been. But then Australia is home to several species that until recently the scientific world had thought extinct for millions of years (e.g. nothomyrmecia macrops – the dinosaur ant, and the earth’s oldest life form, marine stromatolites), so who knows what other mysterious creatures await discovery out there in the ancient lands beyond the black stump.

The birth of a whirlwind
Halfway through our second week we three were working alone on a block at the far edge of the plantation when I straightened to relieve a stiff back and spied a piece of bush, and quite a large piece, blowing about in a wind, which struck me as odd seeing that where I was, only 70 yards away, was completely calm and windless and had been all day. As I continued to watch, the bush was lifted clear of the ground and whisked into a spiralling air current before flopping to earth again. This happened a couple more times then it was joined by some other bits of trash from the edge of the bare brown field and some surface dust that revealed the vortex of the whirlwind or Willy Willy as they’re commonly known. I called out to Shaun and Dave and we watched transfixed as more detritus and dust were sucked into the funnel, which grew in diameter and power as it moved slowly towards Shaun and me. Squinting in anticipation I was eager to see what it felt like and stood my ground, guessing it might be like sticking your head out a car window at 60MPH, but just before it was upon us it did a sharp left turn and proceeded at speed in Dave’s direction…much to Dave’s disapproval. As the by now quite large Willy Willy twisted menacingly closer, picking its way over the furrows, Dave decided a hasty tactical retreat was in order and with the whirlwind only a few yards away, leapt behind the van to avoid "doing a Dorothy”. So I witnessed the birth of a Willy Willy – cool!

A Mystery Solved
In the midst of a lunchtime conversation one day I learned a very satisfying thing. Herman was talking about bush fires and said that the 15 or so hovering hawks that I’d pointed out were probably not hovering over road kill as I had speculated, but more likely, smoke! It was then that I recalled the Bush Tucker Man episode that ended with Les sitting inside a little dry stone building that resembled a squat chimney, which used to be used by Aboriginal people to catch hawks for eating by grabbing them through the grass and twig roof when the hawks came down to catch his twirlie-hankie-on-a-stick decoy distressed animal, through the smoke of his fire; Les never expounding on the reason for the hawks' attraction to smoke in the first place. Herman continued to explain that the hawks have come to know that when there’s a bushfire, the air in front of the advancing fire-line will be filled with big fat grasshoppers (they grow to over 3 inches long here) fleeing the blaze and certain death, their usual caution thrown to the wind; and that’s what attracts the hawks – the fleeing feast! Apparently the hawks so engorge themselves that they sometimes find difficulty getting airborne with all the extra weight, and hop and skip out of the way of approaching vehicles rather than flying off. So after quite a few years of this niggling little mystery I had happily found enlightenment.

The Ord River 3-day Crocodile Slalom event
We were finishing at the plantation for 2 weeks now since the work that we had been brought in to help with was finished. Herman and Darren, the plantation owners, offered us another few weeks’ work if we were going to be around in two weeks time, so we happily accepted and decided to use this two week gap for some further exploration. We had left a voice message for Jakob, our Danish mate who’d left us in Broome (to look for work in Port Hedland), and he was now on his way north to join us for the coming expedition. So after a day’s rest the four of us headed off on a 3-day self-guided canoe safari down the Ord River, starting from just below the dam at Lake Argyle and finishing back in Kununurra, 50km distant.

We climbed into our lumbering canoes, which were loaded up with our sleeping bags, food, water, cookware and mozzie nets. As we paddled unsteadily out into the main flow of the river, trying to discover our sea legs, the bloke that had dropped us off shouted a few words of advice across the water to us, none of which we paid much attention to until at the last he said, and I quote verbatim because suddenly our attention was rapt, “This stretch of water you’ll be paddling down is known to be home to about 44,000 crocodiles…so whatever you do, don’t trail your hands in the water!” But as we began in unison to back-paddle he added that these were freshwater crocodiles and not a threat to people, except when they mistake trailing fingers as a tasty snack, like some strange frog or something, not realizing until it’s too late that it was in fact a small but rather important and much loved part of a much larger animal. So reassured we rejoined our expedition and paddled off down the Ord, keeping our eyes peeled for the telltale eye humps, which is often all you see of the crocodiles.

We quickly adapted to paddling and soon relaxed to enjoy the pristine wilderness scenery all around. A reasonable current flowed in the river so we made good progress despite this being the first time canoeing for any of us. Thanks to a sketchy map (or some sketchy map reading) we managed to miss the day-1 campsite and arrived at the day-2 site by 2:45pm, even with several long stops en-route to explore the riverside. We pitched camp here after an abandoned 1-hour struggle against the current to backtrack upstream to camp #1.

Guests for breakfast
At breakfast on day-2 we had our campsite invaded, firstly by a big King Brown snake, about 7 or 8 feet long and bold as brass who slithered calmly into and unhurriedly through our camp, completely un-intimidated by our presence, which I thought was terrific and perfectly in keeping with his regal appellation. In fact we had to get up to make way for him since it was obvious his regular morning patrol took him through the middle of where we sat, perhaps for a morning drink down by the river.

While my fellow paddlers kept a wise and wary distance, for this was ²Australia’s most dangerous and aggressive snake, whose strike can kill a human in minutes. I followed him around with my camera for about 15 minutes, hoping to get a photo if he remained calm. Most animals, even deadly ones like this, aren’t likely to just attack people for the hell of it as this will always include an element of unnecessary risk to the animal. So when I got too close for his comfort and he got uptight and rose slightly, I’d shrink back and give him more space so he could see that I wasn’t a threat. Mostly he seemed simply as curious about me as I was about him: perhaps we were the first humans he’d ever seen, way out here after all! This exchange of body language eventually allowed me to safely get within 2 or 3 feet for a photo, necessary because I only had a standard lens with no zoom power. Right after this expedition I wrote home and asked my folks to post my long lens!

[NB:² From the IMAX movie “Australia – Land before Time”, which I quote because I’ve heard various versions of Australia’s deadliest snake. Really though this is a great misconception: Check this out » Australian Snakes - the modern myth ]

A little later that same hour, a 5-foot long lizard (a yellow spotted monitor), sauntered into camp: it seemed we were a major attraction for the locals this morning. So with him hissing and grumbling a little in protest we coaxed and corralled him into a patch of sunshine so that we could all get a photo. We spent the remainder of day-2 exploring the surrounding creek system and tributaries, doing a few bush walks where the lay of the land appealed to us, returning that evening to the same camping spot high on the bank above the Ord, having enjoyed a full day’s exploration and having encountered a few freshies (freshwater crocodiles) and some fruit bats, to add to the breakfast guests we'd begun our day with.

Nightime Crocodile Angst
Soon darkness descended on the Ord, blanketing the river and creeks and subduing the bird song, which thinned as the onset of night marked the launch of the crocs for dinner (cue Jaws music!) Some reed-dwelling birds still managed an occasional brave squawk or hoot or whistle, so there was a change to the soundtrack as the nightshift took over but the air still carried a mixed chorus of sounds, including the constant background wall of white noise from the clicking Cicadas, putting me in mind of a Tarzan movie soundtrack. Suddenly we all sat bolt upright as we heard the unmistakable and very close-by rhythmic thrashing sound as a crocodile did a death-roll with some unfortunate bird or other creature. The transformation was immediate… and chilling, for all noise ceased abruptly, even the Cicadas, strangely. The whole wildlife population seemed to have reacted just as we had: we could sense everything was holding its breath; immobile; listening. All sensory apparatus was on full alert and all beaks were firmly zipped shut! The entire area within earshot was veiled in an eerie pregnant silence that endured for a very long five minutes, obviously nobody wanting to chirp the dinner bell. It was about then that we recounted that figure of 44,000 crocodiles and remembered hearing rumours that there were still a few renegade salties in this section of the river…and they include humans on their menu if the opportunity presents itself!. So in a fit of paranoia we set about gathering pieces of bush to erect a makeshift fort around our sleeping area and retreated below our mozzie nets (it’s not only crocodiles that eat you out here), for a slightly troubled night’s sleep under another terrific star-studded, cloud free Kimberley sky.

Our third and final day afloat on the Ord River was something of a slog since the river was wide and slow, the current almost non-existent, offering no assistance to the chore of paddling the final 23kms to lake Kununurra and the end of our journey. The company who’d rented us the canoes had said that most folk finish about 2pm on the third day…exactly as we had done but when we ‘phoned them from Kimberleyland Caravan Park, for some reason there was no answer. We sat around in the hot sun for the next 2 hours, traipsing down the road every 20 minutes to ‘phone the canoe company, never getting any answer and slowly growing disgruntled. In the end we left a message and stashed the boats and gear where they could pick it up later. This unforeseen delay dashed our plans to head off that afternoon down the Gibb River Road as it would be dark in an hour and a half. We had little choice but to spend another night in Kununurra and hit the road in the morning so off we trudged to Town Caravan Park.

To relieve boredom we invented tree slalom: the tighter the gap, the higher the points value. This one was a high-pointer and too tight as it turned out, and Shaun & Dave got jammed and had to be pulled free.

While sitting around the back end of the van in the campsite that evening, on the periphery of a chat with other hobos, I watched in disbelief first, swinging swiftly to irritation at the effrontery of a mosquito who, in plain view, landed on the back of my right hand and without the merest hint of a pause to check whether the coast was clear, donned his bib and was just about to tuck into my flesh when he got a shock! My immediate reaction was a swift cranial bludgeon. Yep - I head-butted the parasitic little @#&%!. I bet that surprised him! It must have been like having the Moon fall on you. Everyone fell into hearty chuckles at the sight of this, and the mortally squished but faintly recognisable shape of the late mosquito, firmly stuck to the middle of my forehead as I straightened myself after delivering the mozzie’s sentence.

next...Part 2 - The Gibb River Road