To the Northern Territory!

After dropping off a couple resumes in Broome and exploring the town a bit I was finding myself feeling like I had seen all I wanted. It also didn't look like I'd be able to get a pearling job for a couple weeks (if at all). So, on somewhat of a whim I decided to leave on Saturday May 2nd for a tour north from Broome to Darwin (9 days long).

The tour was amazing. Another set of instant friends and some really great sights to see. I would almost say that Western Australia keeps on getting better as you move up the coast. On our first rest stop there was this sign that gives you an idea of the places we saw and the distance we covered.

I really felt like I got a taste of the outback when I saw bushfires along the road. Incredible. In California people would be freaking out all over the place and we'd be in 'emergency' mode. But not in Western Australia. It's so sparse and the fires put themselves out after a bit. Sometimes they're lit by locals for regeneration, but then usually you'd see someone out and about controlling them. We definitely didn't see anyone around for these fires. Check out our view from the bus - right alongside the road! And as you drive by you can feel the heat radiate through the windows.

On our first day we stopped and had lunch in Derby. It's only a couple hours north of Broome, but instead of crystal clear beautiful water, it's brown and murky...and littered with saltwater crocs. There's no way you want to be swimming there! A warning sign that started to pop up in a lot of places we visited over the nine days ("Crocodiles inhabit these waters..."):

We then started along the Gibb River Road - a former cattle route that's almost 660 kilometres long and goes straight through the Kimberley. We spent our first night in Windjana Gorge National Park, where we saw Devonian rock (about 400 million years old) with some fossilized primeval marine life. Pretty cool that a good portion of the west coast used to be one huge coral reef and now they're spectacular gorges. In fact, I recently learned that off the west and north coast is one of the most amazing huge reefs, even cooler than the Great Barrier Reef. Not many people go there or know about it because there are so many sharks and crocs that you wouldn't last very long out there. I guess that's one way nature has figured out how to preserve itself all on its own!

The second morning we headed to Tunnel Creek - a small cave with a bit of a creek running through it. We grabbed our flashlights and headed in to the dark, wading through water up to our knees. With our flashlights we scanned the water until you could see pretty bright red dots...freshwater crocodiles! The one thing you learn pretty quickly in Australia is the difference between a saltwater crocodile and a freshwater one. In a nutshell, you can't swim with saltwater crocs, you'd get eaten alive. But freshwater crocodiles are smaller and will only 'nip' if you bother them (which may be a pretty mean injury, but mostly they're probably more scared of you than you are of them). Still, it did get pretty scary at some points seeing their eyes shine back at you in the dark. Anyhow, here's a split in the rocks where some light was shining in from outside - gives you an idea of what we were wading through.Today we also got to see our first cool waterfall of the trip at Bell Gorge. Awesome swimming and we didn't have to worry about any crocodiles around!

We stayed overnight at Bell Gorge. As we were hanging out by the campfire and preparing dinner, I could hear some rustling in the bush behind us. After some time I walked over with my flashlight to see what it was, but it was still out of sight. I guess eventually the little guy must have gained confidence and came out to sniff at our food. It's some kind of little wallaby - you can tell because it jumped around to move (and used its tail for leverage) and its hind legs are bent for maximum jumping power. He was pretty cute and hung around long enough to grab a good photo of it.Our campsite the second night:
Day three we started off with a short walk at Galvan's Gorge. I loved how the waterfalls just kept getting better and better - this one even had a rope swing. You can barely see it in this picture, but it's off to the right there. I did a couple jumps and flips - good fun. And swimming was always so welcome after a little bit of a hike into the gorges. Like I said, the waterfalls just kept on getting better. My favorite was Manning Gorge, which was our next stop that day. We got to our campsite just before lunch, had a quick bite to eat, then headed off on a 45 minute walk to Manning Gorge. Check out the photos - we swam to the falls and you could even swim behind it and hang out back there. And then we had a little lizard sighting too, catching some rays on the rocks. The third photo here shows a portion of our hike in that we had to cross a river. They had styrofoam boxes at each end that you could stuff your bag into and swim across with it, keeping your things dry. It reminded me of the puzzle/riddle with the fox, the chicken, and the corn and figuring out how to get them all across the river without one eating the other. (Found it online: A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river. He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing. If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken. If the chicken and the corn is left together, the chicken will eat the corn. How does he do it?)

Manning Falls:Lounging lizard guy:The river we had to cross:After our walk back to camp we had kangaroo for dinner!

Day four, we were up early to head to Emma Gorge, now officially in Eastern Kimberley. Remember what I said about each falls being better than the next? Yup, this one was really awesome too. It was the highest one we'd seen and the water most definitely the coldest. But all along the walls it was so green with ferns everywhere and water dripping all over the place. We went for a swim again, of course. The best was just floating on our backs, ears in the water so it was quiet, and staring up to the sunlight. I could have spent hours there.We spent the night in the township of El Questro. It's a random community with really nice shower facilities (pretty sweet when you're camping!) and a cool little part of the Pentecost River to swim in. It's also a place where folks with a lot of money might come to 'get away'...paying up to $2,000 per night! We didn't have to spend that much money...we pulled out our swags and slept under the stars yet again (this trip we spent every night outside).

The next morning we headed to our first hot springs - Zebedee Hot Springs. The water was more warm than hot, but it was a nice difference from the swim at Emma Gorge that had been pretty chilly. We got to hang out here for some time before heading off to the Bungle Bungles.
After a stop in Turkey Creek for lunch (see photo number one - about 688 kilometers off from our first rest stop) we made it to Mabel Downs Station which is a property you drive through for a couple hours to get to the Bungle Bungles in Purnululu National Park. Once in Purnululu we set up camp then went to watch the sunset. Got some cool shots to share, I wish I had these kinds of sunsets at home...

Overnight we were serenaded by dingos (I woke up in the middle of the night and just listened to them howling and watched the stars - you could easily see half a dozen shooting stars in the span of a few minutes!) and in the morning we were greeted by a pair of blue-winged kookaburra's. They were so amazing, and really photogenic too - they sat still for us for a while. I'll add a couple photos from our second morning too (we spent two nights at this campsite). On the second morning they were back again and we decided to try to feed them some pancakes. We chucked it and they came, and proceeded to slam the pancake on the floor a couple times before flying off with it (to kill its 'prey' of course). In the fourth photo I added here the little guy has the pancake in his mouth and is in the process of slamming it into the ground. I have a video of it too! (Still not sure how to upload video's here, but at some point I will try.)

That day we got our first sighting of the Bungle Bungles (a World Heritage site in Western Australia, only declared so in 1987). The Bungle Bungles are famous for the sandstone striped domes - alternating orange and grey. The differences in color are because of the differences in clay content and porosity of the layers - orange has oxidised iron compounds in layers that dry too fast for cyanobacteria to multiply and the grey bands have cyanobacteria growing on the surface where moisture accumulates - therefore making these cool designs on the wind-formed domes. Here they are (aerial view, more about that in a couple paragraphs):
First thing in the morning we walked to Piccanniny Creek and Cathedral Gorge, where we saw a Water Monitor lizard (average size of 2.5 meters as adults). Walking around on the sand you could see where they had just been walking because their tails made snake-like patterns with claw marks on each side. We had just been looking at the trails they left behind when one was just wandering on by in front of us. Here he is, picking up speed to head back into the bush as we got closer:

Next up: helicopter flight! I decided to do the 30 minute flight and loved it - my first helicopter ride! No doors, but very safe seatbelts (I'm sure), and some great aerial views. The first photo of the Bungle Bungles I put above was from the flight I took. Our pilot was great and had a lot of good information for us as we flew over the different parts of the National Park. I took what feels like a million photos, here area a couple I took of gorges.

Y Gorge - appropriately named because of its shape:
And another a bit further north - this one more red in color and the stripes are pretty easy to see here:
After the ride, we headed to Echidna Chasm - which was cool also because the pilot had pointed it out to us on the ride. Here the walls of the chasm looked like they had just been slapped together with rocks and dirt pressed together - which I guess they had over millions of years, but it was cool to see. There were palm trees inside the gorges too. On our way in we passed a Great Bowerbird nest. The little guy wasn't there, but the nest was really cool. I guess they spend a lot of their time just searching for exactly the right colored rocks to put around the next and then twigs to build the middle part. The stones are to attract the female birds and if they get it right and its pretty enough to lure in a female, the male will do a little dance for the female before mating in the bower.
A closer look at the twig structure this guy built (for all you Patrick Dougherty fans out there, I imagine this is the sort of thing he's going for...and for all of you that have forgotten, he built a couple structures on the Bowdoin quad in 2001 - pretty cool).
The following day we had a long drive to Kununurra, where a good portion of the movie Australia was filmed (well, just outside of Kununurra). On our way out of the Purnululu National Park, we had a couple cool sightings. First a couple of dingos started running straight at the bus. We stopped and grabbed a couple pictures of them as they slowed down to check us out, then they were off. This is my favorite photo I got of them:

We also passed a blue tongued lizard hanging out in the middle of the road (not a great place to hang). These guys are slow moving and relatively docile, so we had a good chance to check him out too, then we made sure he got out of the road before driving off.

Here we are crowding around to get a good look at the lizard.Once we set up camp at a campsite in Kununurra, we headed to Lake Argyle (Australia's second largest artificial lake, surface area of about 1,000 sq kilometers) for a sunset boat cruise. A view of the lake just before sunset:

Once we got on the boat our first stop was to check out an area where rock wallabe's hang out. They're hard to spot, but I guess they must do enough of these boat tours that they know to come out when the guide rattles a tupperware full of bits of food. This is the only one that came out, but she had a joey in her pouch! He tucked his head in when she started jumping down the rocks.
Here's the boat at sunset. Partway through a fire had started just over the mountain and you could see smoke on the horizon. And since it was a cloudless evening as well, the sunset was good but not particularly photogenic, so we moved on for a quick swim.
We had an opportunity also to jump off a couple rocks up to 10 meters high (depth of the water at that point was 25 meters, so we didn't have to worry about hitting the bottom!). By that time the sun had set and the only light we had was a little floodlight from the boat - which gave the illusion that you weren't jumping as far. You only realized how far the drop was when you're in mid-air and then it's too late! We got to jump a couple times then piled on the boat again to head back to camp.

Not far from our campsite that night (in fact, right next to it) was a little area we fed some crocodiles (in retrospect I wonder if I should have been worried about that...;). Our guide had bought a couple fish at our last grocery store stop. This guy was in the middle of pondering eating the fish we had thrown him. I think he may have been waiting for us to leave before digging in though.

The second to last morning we had some down time to hang out by a pool in Kununurra. Here's one of our finds around the pool that morning - the biggest grasshoppers I've ever seen. Stuck my foot in the second photo for perspective...!

Our first stop of the day before a long drive to Katherine Gorge was to check out a Zebra Rock Gallery (dated nearly 600 million years old and found only by Lake Argyle). Pretty cool rocks - at first I really thought they had taken the rocks and painted them, the patterns were so crazy.

At the Zebra Rock Gallery they also had a couple birds in cages very desperate for attention - like this guy that for most of the time had one hand on a toy (so he hung upside down) and with the other would push off the cage walls to spin. Then he would lie down in his food bowl and spread his wings until you couldn't see his face and he'd make the most ear-splitting noise. He didn't talk much aside from "hello" until we were walking away and he kept repeating "Bye Bye" until we couldn't hear him anymore. Kept us amused for a while, and then he posed for a photo.
We stopped under a shady tree by the Zebra Rock Gallery for lunch when this guy came hopping by. He stayed a couple minutes and then left, but got some good pictures of him too. Here he's suctioning himself to my hand.
Next stop - Katherine Gorge area. As we drove into our campsite that night there were about a dozen kangaroos bouncing around. They dispersed as we drove up, but the same ones greeted us early morning as we woke up. The sunrise and the roos:
And for those of you still confused about what a swag might be that I was sleeping in all these nights, this is me tucked into it. It's basically a mobile bed with a small mattress, a waterproof bottom and a canvas top for extra warmth and to keep bugs and things out. If it gets too cold at night all you have to do is throw the top part of the swag over your head. Pretty nifty!
On our last day before arriving in Darwin that evening, we had another hot springs stop. These were man-made and more luke-warm than hot, but still pretty fun to have a quick swim in, especially after so many hours in the bus.

We also had a stop at Edith Falls where we had a 150 meter swim to the waterfall to check it out. I was happy to finally have to put in a little extra work to get to it, but once there you couldn't really do much so I climbed up on a rock, hung out for a minute, then swam back. Here's the waterfall in the distance through the greens:

And of course only on our way out did we see the crocodile warning sign...not sure if I would have had as much confidence swimming to the falls if I had seen this beforehand. The freshwater crocs don't go into deep parts of water so you don't have to worry about them (and because their bite isn't as bad, like I mentioned before), but would have been terrifying to run into a saltie...

And for any of you Crocodile Dundee fans out there, here's the buffalo (Charlie) that was used in the movie; stuffed for eternal preservation at the Adelaide River Inn, about an hour south of Darwin.Here I am just before crossing into the Northern Territory from Western Australia. The fact that I could sit in the middle of the only highway connecting into Darwin from Western Australia for a photo shows you how sparse things are out there... When we arrived in Darwin, we all checked into our respective hostels and got cleaned up then went out for a couple drinks (about 17 people on our tour). In the next couple days folks will slowly leave, but for now it's been fun to have a couple days after our trip to continue hanging out.

And what do you know, when I got into Darwin I got a call from a place I had left my resume at in Broome and a job offer. Sigh. After a bit of a debate I don't think I'm going to go back; instead I'm crossing my fingers for a similar job up here. Will keep you posted.

Thanks for reading - I know this was a long entry. :) Hope it was worth it!