Waking
early we visited the lower pool before sunrise. We
breakfasted, broke camp, and began the one and a half hour walk to
Manning Gorge. Most of the walk was along a plateau and the vegetation
included Kapok trees with fruit and brilliant yellow flowers.
We spent several hours in the gorge. We swam under the waterfall in the top pool, and then watched, over lunch, as more adventurous visitors jumped from 7m high rocks into the pool. In the shallows we fed biscuit crumbs to shoals of small fish. It was very beautiful. Back at the campsite we showered. Cheryl's shower turned out to be warm, heated by a solar panel on the roof. We filled all our water containers at the roadhouse, and set off. The Gibb River Road was reputed to deteriorate markedly after the Mt Barnett roadhouse, so we wondered how we would manage.
John was driving and decided to take a turn-off after only 20 km. According to the sign it was 3km to find the Barnett River Gorge. The track was abysmal. John thought it was fun driving. However once the track became the solid bedrock of a dry creek, we decided to park and continue on foot. Eventually we found the pool of the Barnett River Gorge, had a second lunch, and a paddle. On the return track it became evident that there were many informal campsites – we guessed that these might be for gatherings of the aboriginal community, as an aboriginal corporation ran Mr Barnett Station. Returning to the Gibb River Road we found this short diversion had taken two hours.
Now it became important to make good time in order to reach a reasonable place to stay the night. But this was not to be. We got caught behind a slow-moving large truck carrying a grader. Because of the massive amount of dust it created, we needed to remain half a kilometre behind it (our one attempt to overtake it was unsuccessful), and most cars travelling in the opposite direction came to a complete halt, as they could not see through the dust cloud it generated. This situation continued for 90km. It was punctuated only once, when we stopped our car to observe a wedge-tail eagle being harassed by two much smaller crows. We eventually got past the truck when it stopped for a break very close to the Kalumburu Road turn-off. We continued on the Gibb River Road, getting rather anxious as the light was failing and there seemed to be no place even to pull off the road to make a `bush camp'. This was no road to be on after dark.
Then Cheryl saw a
side road leading to some trees, with at least one car and tent in
place. We stopped, reversed, and joined them. There were, in all, four
groups camping there that night. One group consisted of Pete, a road
contractor, and his four-year-old son Jack; and another was a Melbourne
couple Rex and Bev. We joined them over Pete's campfire, which we
realised was primarily to keep mosquitoes at bay. It was Pete's
company's job to manage the northern half of the Gibb Rover Road from
Kunnunurra to the Kalumburu turn-off. This included removing
"road-kills", and the excellent poker Pete was using to tend the fire
was actually a crook to drag dead kangaroos to the road edge. The bush
campsite was constructed for the road workers, and was called the Camel
Creek campsite (though not marked on any maps, or on the road itself).
It was a lovely place, but without any facilities apart from beautiful
gum trees and vegetation. It was our only experience of "bush-camping"
during the two weeks.
