Derby

"On the Road again" That song often pop's into my head these days, none more so than today. We look forward to returning to Kununara in the future as we really enjoyed our visit and would like to see future progress there. Anyway the decision to travel via the Gibb River Road or not continued to haunt me, I finally decided not to after talking with travelers coming out. The decision was not based on "can the rig do it" because I know that it can, rather, it was because a lot of the interesting sights actually involve driving off the road into stations, some of these are quite long drives and involve unpowered and quite expensive sites. So we will save this for future trips.

Instead we drove to Turkey Creek for brunch at an extremely busy Roadhouse (these places are a licence to make money). Not much to see at Turkey Creek so it was onward to Halls Creek, which looked like a nice little place, but once again not a lot to entertain us, so onwards. The days drive displayed a lot of different scenery along the way, some of it ruggedly beautiful, all of it interesting. With the assistance of "Camp's 5" which is a guide to free camping sites in Australia we found a free camp at a place called "Mary's Pool". This is a great little spot, high on a bank overlooking the Mary River in the wet season and Mary's Pool in the dry season. Obviously not a secret site, there was about 80 other vans there,it was however a beaut place to stop for the night. We met our neighbours for the night John and Chris from Newcastle and enjoyed their company for the evening. Although we were tempted to stay a second night we resisted the temptation when we awoke to find a strong wind blowing, so it was off to Fitzroy Crossing.

Fitzroy Crossing very much the same as Hall's so we pushed on to Derby and booked into the Caravan Park for Four nights.

The main object in coming to Derby was to do a tour to the Horizontal Falls, so we went to Tourist info to book only to find that all tours were booked out for the next two weeks. The only available tour was from Broome on the following Saturday at a cost of $695 each and was only a day trip not an overnight trip like we wanted. So if any of you traveling behind us are contemplating this tour, book ahead and do your research early.

We wanted to have a look at Winjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, so the next day We set off up the Gibb River Road, 80 K's of Tarred road and then into the dirt 46 K's to the turn off and found this section of road to be very good. The next 40 K's to the Gorge was pretty badly corrugated and was slow going. We went to Tunnel Creek first and realised upon arrival that we had forgotten our torches, some friendly travelers loaned us torches and we walked, waded through the tunnel and were impressed with the colors and limestone. The story of "Jandamurra" a aboriginal who resisted the early settlers land grabs and had a long battle with police, which ended with him being shot is well depicted at both these locations and we witnessed a Film Crew shooting a documentary along the road, so look out for it in the future.

The Windjana Gorge involved a walk through a beautiful landscape of rocks and greenery and an abundance of freshwater Croc's, some of which I walked within a few feet of, check out the photo.

I am not the most attentive person in the world and when on the road tend to forget what day it is and what date it is, so I managed to forget Judy's birthday and I reckon I will be in the doghouse for quite a while, could turn out to be expensive.

Derby has a wharf and has a huge tide sometimes up to 8 meters, fishing is good however I did not get around to it. We did visit the Boab Prison Tree and Australia's longest water trough and took a photo of two trees that fell in love!

Thursday 5 th August we headed towards Broome and another adventure.