Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 79 - Wednesday July 27th 2016 - Fitzroy Crossing to Halls Creek, Western Australia

We actually didn’t get going that early this morning. Don’t get me wrong we were up, you always are when your camping and the majority of the grey brigade of Ozzies that fill the campsites up are certainly up and on the road around 07:00.

We were on our way just before nine, unfortunately we were heading in the wrong direction.

What that means is that we were on the hunt for the Geikie Gorge as they do a river cruise through the gorge that we really liked the sound of doing. As we had already passed through Fitzroy Crossing and had not seen any sign for it we just presumed that it must be the other side of town, after a 15km drive in the wrong direction it was clear that it wasn’t so we turned around back in the direction from where we came.

This time we found it and travelled about 20km into the wilderness to the

access point to the Fitzroy river.The boat trips only left at certain times of the day and we had just missed the 09:30 and the next was due to leave at 11:00 so we bought our tickets and went off for a walk around one of the trails of the park to marvel at the limestone reef that this area is made up of.

That’s right a reef, this whole area billions of years ago used to be underwater and the reef is what is left behind. We are here visiting the region in the dry season and it is absolutely incredible to think that the waters have been known to raise some three metres plus in height to where they are now. We walked around a ring circuit, admiring all the rock formations as we went, the water had really given them a unique character. The rock surfaces were all smooth or had the appearance of coral with lines across their surfaces. Australia does seem to have the most unusual landscapes in the world and their rocks are up there on the strange list as well and these were no exception to that, especially as you had to imagine the whole lot being underwater!

We completed the loop around the reef and still had some time to kill so we turned on the gas and made a cup of coffee and sat out on the picnic benches.

11:00 soon came round and us and our fellow passengers were all ushered down to the river to board our metal hulled leisure craft for an hour on the river.

Now seeing an actual river with water in it is quite unusual for this part of the world. In all the driving that we have done we have passed over so many dried up rivers and creeks, they are all labelled telling you what they are and all the flood warning signs are up in place but we have never seen that many that have any water in them at all so seeing the Fitzroy River in all its wet glory was really something of a novelty.

So the Geikie Gorge was named after some well known English geologist by the person that discovered it but prior to that it had been known by the local aboriginal people as the Darngku Gorge and it fact it will shortly be changing its name back to that, makes sense especially as this area is slap bang in the middle of a huge aboriginal settlement and lands.

The gorge is slightly odd though as it appears to be one sided but this appearance is only because we are here in the dry season so the water has retreated so much that the river does not flow to the other rock surface, it runs along a huge sandbar instead.

So do you picture it now. High limestone reef rock face on one side of us and lush green vegetation and sand the other, that’s what we were cruising down.

It wasn’t just us and the skipper and the other boat passengers either, no. Along the banks of the river, on the rocks, and in the water were a number of freshwater crocodiles. So much smaller than their cousins that we have seen both in Australia and Florida, apparently you can even go swimming here in the river (there is no way on earth that we would even contemplate it!!).

We cruised down the river, along the banks watching the crocodiles sunbathing. As the gorge wall got higher it turned into more of fancy cheese, all holes in it and caverns that had been formed from billions of years of water movement. You could really see the water marks in some of the rock faces and it was really hard to get your head around just how much the waters rise in the wet season. Nearly everything that we were looking at now would be lost and the Fitzroy River would actually end up meeting with the Margaret River making it a river that would nearly flow the length of Australia.

It really was a tale of two halves this boat ride. On the other side of the bank away from the limestone was a sandbar with the greenest of vegetation and trees growing, hence there was also a lot of bird life in the park.

Now we were in a little danger of becoming a little bit over gorged, I mean we have visited a few this trip and they are all starting to blur just a little bit so getting to see one from a different perspective on a boat was a welcome change. To be fair this gorge is completely different as it is a lot wider than what we have seen in the past and its waters are a lot deeper but still, we’ve seen a few gorges!

With our very pleasant boat trip at an end it was back to the van for what turned out to be a very boring and windy drive.

It was just less than four hours to our next destination, Halls Creek, normally that would be fine but with a very strong head wind we made slow progress of it and the fastest thing to travel was the petrol gauge, we arrived with the emergency light flashing at us.

Now after lasts nights non powered sight it was a real relief to know that tonight we were booked in to a site already so there was no panic on. Unfortunately, that feeling was short lived as Trev realised that he had made a bit of a boob. He had booked and paid for us to stay at the wrong Halls Creek, the one he had made the booking for was in Victoria, right at the bottom of Australia! Mistakes happen and all that but now we were on a bit of a race to try and get to the campsite before all the powered sites had been taken (there was actually loads empty when we did get there).

The scenery of the drive did not really reveal anything new about Australia to us. We went from bush to more bush, the odd cow to red pindan and termite mounds everywhere to weird rocks to bush again.

Arriving into Halls Creek was just as we had imagined. There really not that much to it but it does have again a very large aboriginal presence around the town. We went straight to the campsite to check in and as we just said there were even powered sites to choose from so there had been no reason to stress at all. We got our site, took the chairs out of the van and left them up in our space and drove off straight away to fill up with petrol. Like some of the service we have encountered in Australia, filling up the van always seems to take an age as you have to wait for the car in front of you to finish then pay and it just seems more hassle than it is anywhere else. We filled up and headed off to what is known locally as the Chinese Wall.

Some Ozzies on the boat trip this morning had mentioned it so we thought that we would have a look and see what it was all about. We dove about 5km out of town to gate that said “please shut” We didn’t know if that meant we couldn’t go through or what but we got out the van drove through and proceeded down a very bumpy uneven unsealed road for about two km’s with everything shaking as we went.

The wall is a natural line of banking stones that run along the apex of some hilly ground, the great wall of china it is not and we should know! It is an interesting rock formation, odd looking and interesting and I can see where they were going by calling it the great wall but no, the great wall it is most definitely not!

We had planned to also go out and see the so called crater that was the number one thing to supposedly see here but on discovering it was 100km plus down the road still we called it a day and headed back to the campsite to plug in and chill out.

Dinner tonight was a very mixed bag of ingredients. A tin each of Heinz beef casserole (a real case of find the meat) and some fresh veg with gravy to add to it. It was just nice to actually have some vegetables again and I’m sure that our bodies will go into shock by toilet time in the morning!

Trev cooked and Jonathan washed up and wrote up blogs again until mid way through the evening. Feeling all sweaty and a little bit yuk Jonathan went off and had a shower and then we both settled in for the night with a bottle of wine and our iPads .

Out on the roads again tomorrow with another drive but starting to slowly head up in the direction of the north.