Monday July 11     Bell Gorge – Manning Gorge (Mt Barnett Road House)

Another beautiful sunrise. We had our cold shower, and spent some time enjoying the bird life: many very small doves, and a kingfisher feeding in an orange-flowering gum tree. After breaking camp we travelled 10km to Bell Gorge and walked down into the Gorge. How beautiful it was. This was the first time on the trip we had seen flowing water. Here the waterfall was still "working". As we climbed down to the bottom of the falls, we passed a group led by the ranger. He admired John's "IT" tee shirt (that our son James had made in a business venture at high school); there was even some talk of exchanging tee shirts. We swam in the pool at the bottom, right up to, and under, the falls. It was wonderful. After returning to the campsite, we had a second shower – what luxury!

It was now our third day out of Fitzroy Crossing, and we had passed no store of any kind. Lunches would become problematic without the bread we had forgotten to buy, and we needed some diesel. We decided to stop at the first opportunity. This was the Imintji store – on an aboriginal run station. We found diesel (no petrol), and frozen bread. Perfect. A sign at the entrance to the shop read "no school, no shop", evidently for the children in the community.

As it was getting close to lunchtime, we made our way along a sidetrack to find Adcock Gorge. It was very quiet. We found seats on a large rock beside the pool at the end of the gorge near the waterfall, and relaxed and ate some of our newly acquired bread. We observed many hundreds of white corellas in the trees in and on top of the gorge. It seemed to us to be very quiet and peaceful, but at some stage there was a call from a far-off corella and more than 2000 corellas lifted off their perches simultaneously. They flew back and forth in waves, filling our vision and hearing with white flapping, and eventually left the gorge.

Returning to the Toyota, it was decided that Cheryl should take a turn driving on the Gibb River Road. But first to get out of the car park. This was the first time we had required 4WD to get out of the deep sand. We had hoped to stop at another gorge, Galvan's Gorge, but the turn-off was obscured by extensive road works at Galvan's "jump-up". We had heard that "jump-up's" on the Gibb River Road were one of the major reasons why 4WD was a requirement, and had wondered what they were. The term seemed to refer to a sudden steep incline or decline, which would clearly be a problem, especially in wet weather. A program to improve the road involved sealing the road surface around these jump-ups. Coming to one of these sealed portions of road always provided a welcome relief from the dust.

A short distance past the road works, we needed to stop to allow three brolgas to make their way slowly across the road, but they were not slow enough for us to organise cameras to take a photograph. Finally we reached Mt Barnett roadhouse, and cooled down with a soft drink while waiting our turn to make a phone call. The next phone we would see would be many hundreds of kilometres, and several days away. We discovered that our son James was to go to Brazil for two weeks soon after we returned.

The campsite was some kilometres off the road from the roadhouse, next to Manning Gorge lower pool. It was pleasant cooling off in the water watching the sun go down. The campsite contained many large boab trees, and we chose a site next one of the smaller ones. All was well until after dark when a bullock from the Mt Barnett station decided to feed very slowly and very close to our tent. Cheryl debated whether to spend some hours in the Toyota.