Our first destination after leaving Broome was the Dampier Peninsula via the Cape Leveque Road. The first part of the Cape Leveque Road is sealed but this is then followed by almost 80 kilometres of unsealed road of highly variable condition. When we travelled it many sections were either very rough, very corrugated or very sandy – and sometimes a combination of all three types of sections – and occasionally we opted to travel on either the wrong side of the road or on the banked edge of the road just to get a more comfortable ride.
Our first stop was Beagle Bay to visit the beautiful Sacred Heart Church. The church, which was built between 1915 and 1918, is an outstanding example of the creative use of local resources for both construction and decoration purposes.
More than 60,000 bricks were handmade locally for the main church building using a mixture of white clay and black mud and the lime used in the mortar and the whitewash was made by burning down seashells in the kiln used for firing the bricks. A few years after the church was finished another 15,000 double bricks – the equivalent of 30,000 regular bricks – were made for the construction of the 12 metre high bell tower. (The original bell tower collapsed in September 2000 but thanks to the generous support of thousands of individuals and many organisations from all around Australia and overseas it was restored to its former glory by November 2002.)
The original brush and plaster church ceiling, which was inlaid with fragments of pearl shell to represent the stars in the sky, was destroyed by termites in the 1920s after which it was replaced with flattened kerosene tins. However, it is the highly decorated main and side altars that stands out for their simple beauty with hundreds of mother-of-pearl shells, other coloured shells and operculum stone (the ‘lid’ or ‘cover’ that seals a sea snail shell) laid into the plaster. In addition, the Stations of the Cross, which were painted in 1949, have been beautifully framed with pearl shell and coloured shell fragments.
From Beagle Bay we continued on to the Gumbanan Bush Camp where we setup our camper in a sheltered location (we’d read that it can get a bit windy in the more exposed locations) before heading off to the nearby community of Bardi (One Arm Point) to look around and visit the Ardyaloon Trochus Hatchery & Aquaculture Centre (trochus shell is used to make the shell buttons used on many high-end fashion garments). The centre also has a number of large round tanks that are used to house local tropical fish and crabs for display purposes and injured/recovering marine animals like turtles and crocodiles and also a smaller shallow tank used for displaying local marine plants and corals.
After leaving Bardi we headed for the Kooljaman at Cape Leveque Resort to visit the lighthouse and take a walk along the beach. We knew ahead of time that visitors not staying at Kooljaman are required to purchase a $5 day pass in order at access the lighthouse and beach so we went into the shop to purchase our passes.
Although it was just before 5:00 PM when we arrived (after travelling for 5kms along the very rough and sandy access road – apparently vehicles were getting bogged in the sand every couple of days) there was still plenty of daylight left so we were shocked when we were told that day passes were not valid after 5:00 PM and that we would have to come back another time. That said, apparently we would have been allowed to stay and visit the lighthouse and walk along the beach if we were dining in their very expensive restaurant! Based on the *very* poor attitude of the staff and the equally poor condition of the road (along which we would also have had to tow the camper if we did revisit) we decided not to go back …
Before leaving the Gumbanan Bush Camp the following morning we listened to a presentation given by Frank Davey who, along with his family and many of the people living in Bardi, are the traditional owners of this part of the peninsula and the nearby Sunday Island. Apart from the great freshly made damper one of the other highlights of the presentation was the visit to the large rock fish trap, or ‘Mayoorr’, which captures fish on the outgoing tide. It was originally built by Frank’s great grandfather and has been maintained by the family for over five generations.
We also learnt that Frank’s family are part of the Bardi Jawi People, also known as ‘Salt Water People’, and that they pass on much of their traditional culture and stories through song and dance. Frank’s family formed the ‘Bardi Dancers’, a traditional dance troupe that has performed both nationally and internationally, not only to pass on Bardi culture and stories to other family members but also as a way of sharing their culture and stories with people outside their community.
Our next stop for just one night was Derby but just as we reached Roebuck Plains Roadhouse we were directed off the road by a vehicle escorting two trucks carrying wide loads that needed to refuel at the roadhouse – each piece of mining equipment these trucks were carrying was a full two lanes wide! We also refuelled and then had some lunch and it just so happened that the trucks carrying the wide loads left a few minutes before us and were travelling in the same direction. We were stuck behind them for a while and it was quite entertaining to watch the flexible guide posts flicking back and forth when the pieces of mining equipment occasionally came in contact with them.
After leaving Derby we made our way along the western end of the Gibb River Road for the Napier Range and a three night stay in the campground at the spectacular Windjana Gorge. The Napier Range is part of an ancient limestone reef known as the Devonian Reef and millions of years ago the whole area was under the ocean – it is WA’s equivalent of the Great Barrier Reef. Over time the Lennard River has carved Windjana Gorge out of the reef and it is more than three kilometres long and 100 metres wide and has walls on both sides that are between 30 and 100 metres high. While the Lennard River flows through the gorge in the wet season it is reduced to a series of pools in a sandy riverbed in the dry season and many of the larger pools are inhabited by freshwater crocodiles.
After setting up camp we decided to visit nearby Tunnel Creek and although we saw a few WA Variety Club cars leaving another Windjana campground at the same time, and we passed a few on the way, we didn’t think much of it until we arrived at Tunnel Creek. It was packed when we got there!! In addition to about two dozen Variety Club cars there were also two tourist buses parked in the visitor parking and there was a queue of about 15-20 people waiting to get inside Tunnel Creek. We decided to come back again in a few days on our way back to Broome …
Just before sunset we walked to a large pool near Bandingan Rock at the entrance to Windjana Gorge to watch an impressive daily event. At dusk the hundreds of flying foxes which live in the gorge take flight as they head out for a nightly feed and along the way some of them skim the surface of the larger pools to drink. During the late afternoon many of the crocodiles move from the riverbanks and smaller pools into this large pool in the hope of catching an unwary flying fox as it comes in to drink. Although we didn’t see any flying foxes get taken it was impressive to see just how quickly and how high the crocodiles could jump in their attempts to catch them.
On our second day we took a trip to visit the beautiful Bell Gorge and to see its series of waterfalls that cascade into a wonderfully refreshing pool – once again it was lovely to be able to take a dip on a hot day! On the way to and from Bell Gorge we passed a landmark known as “Queen Victoria’s Head” and the remains of several vehicles and a caravan that had not survived their trip to the Kimberley.
It was quite hot the whole time we were at Windjana Gorge and as the temperature in the gorge can be 5-10 degrees hotter due to the radiant heat from the rock walls and the sandy riverbed I did the gorge floor walk early on our second morning there. I walked along the main walking track for as far as I could go (the track is currently on 2.5 kilometres long as the last kilometre of it was damaged during the last wet season and work to repair it has not yet been completed) and then crossed down onto the riverbed and walked along its sandy bottom and its beaches on the return trip. While the walk along the main track was interesting (tip for the unwary – as you will walk below where the flying foxes are roosting for several hundred metres you should wear a hat and you should not, under any circumstances, look up while walking through this section!) it was quite overgrown in places. By contrast, the return trip along the riverbed was spectacular – it was amazing to be able to walk along a mostly dry riverbed with the towering walls of the gorge on both sides!
The other thing I got to see at Windjana Gorge was the beautiful bower of a Great Bowerbird which, unlike the Satin Bowerbird which collects mainly blue objects, collects white, grey and green objects with which to decorate his bower in the hope of attracting a female.
Like many other National Parks in Western Australia entry and camping fees are charged at Windjana Gorge and there is a self-registration station at the entrance. We stayed there for three nights and each evening a park ranger came around to check that the correct fees had been paid and each night he had to collect fees from about 75% of the people who were camped there (and not without some rather lengthy discussions on several occasions). It’s really disappointing when people try and get away without paying the fees due and it seems that many travellers regard the fees payable by ‘honesty’ systems as optional even when they make full use of the services offered …
After packing up and leaving Windjana Gorge quite early we visited Tunnel Creek, which is in Western Australia’s oldest cave system, and when we arrived there at about 0830 there was only one other vehicle in the carpark and only two people in the tunnel. (Just after leaving Tunnel Gorge we passed a couple of tour buses full of tourists heading for Tunnel Gorge – we had timed our visit perfectly!)
Tunnel Creek flows through a water worn, 750 metre long tunnel beneath the Devonian reef – the same reef nearby Windjana Gorge was formed from. The creek once flowed across the top of the Napier range and the original course is still marked on the top of the range. Water seepage gradually enlarged fractures in the limestone until the creek reached today’s underground course. The tunnel is up to 12 metres high and 15 metres wide and contains permanent pools of fresh water in which freshwater crocodiles are found (there were a couple of crocodiles on the sandy riverbank when I walking along the tunnel and even though I was mindful of not getting between them and the water there was one crocodile who was so high up the riverbank that I had no choice but fortunately it didn’t seem to mind).
After our quick trip to the Kimberley we returned to Broome so that we could get the car serviced again before continuing on. It was booked in for first thing on Monday 29 August and as the Toyota dealer was close to the city centre we decided to wait in town while the service was done. The forecast that day was for a possible chance of a few millimetres of rain – what eventuated was the wettest August day on record for Broome. The previous wettest August day was in 1971 when 12.4mm of rain fell – as we sat at the coffee shop we watched more rain than that fall in less than an hour and the total rainfall for the day was more than 22mm! The drains could not cope with so much rain falling so quickly and the roads in the city centre became flooded and, with rain continuing to fall, it took several hours for the water to drain away.
Oh – and this week marks more than 20,000 kilometres and almost 20 weeks since we left home …
The car and the camper …
On the day we were leaving Broome we had booked the car and the camper in to get the wheels rotated as, along with getting the car serviced every 5,000kms while we are towing almost full-time and off-roading some of the time, we want to ensure all tyres wear as evenly as possible (the car and camper have exactly the same rims and tyres). While we were sitting in the waiting room three young people came in wanting to buy five new rims and tyres for their Fiat Ducato van today. They were quite surprised when the man serving them explained that he didn’t have what they wanted in stock and that, providing they were available, it would take at least a week to get them shipped from Perth. They left disappointed and he was left shaking his head at what it would seem is a fairly common occurrence – travellers to small and/or remote localities who expect businesses to have every possible make, model, size and permutation of the products they can sell …
Our trip along the Gibb River Road and Leopold Downs Road was our first test of the Stone Stomper and while it certainly seems to be making a difference we need to do a bit more work to stop stones getting flicked up between the mud flaps on the car and the canvas flap on the Stone Stomper as it is a bit of a stone storer at present …
The car:
Even though we have a UHF radio in the car we usually only switch it on when we are travelling in the midst of trucks and/or road trains. The value of using a UHF radio really became apparent on the day we were following the trucks carrying the pieces of very wide mining equipment as the driver of the lead escort vehicle was able to coordinate an opportunity for the wide loads to move to the side of the road so that we could safely overtake them (he didn’t realise we had a camper to begin with) and so that some oncoming livestock road trains could stay on the bitumen while passing (he said he didn’t want to risk his next piece of steak being bruised from a rough trip!)
One of the things we discovered on the Gibb River Road is that the only fuel available at Imintji is diesel and the next closest place that sells petrol is Mount Barnett – this was the first time in our travels we have come across a fuel station that did not sell any grade of petrol. As we didn’t want to drive to Mount Barnett just for the sake of refuelling this meant we had to detour via Fitzroy Crossing (which was a shorter distance anyway) on our return trip to Broome.
Photos
LITES
19-Sep-16 — 1912
Ronnie and Sweets
Goodness gracious you pair are getting around and the photos are just magnificent, I think you should put them in a 4WD magazine or even as Calendar photos. The clarity and colour in them is perfection itself. Bix and I are so glad you are having a great time and let’s face it we only live once!
Our trip to Vietnam was marvellous, although my leg struggled a bit with the walking tours, all in all, the accommodation was wonderful, service excellent, food to die for and of course, the people are so friendly. I am in 3 weeks back into work and finding it horrendous to say the least, but someone has to keep Bix in the comfort he deserves, so he keeps telling me.
I must tell you about my thoughts, whilst I was recovering because even though I told you about it my antics in my first letter to you, there is more to it that I will endeavour to elaborate on.
I don’t think I mentioned this in my first letter but when I told my sister that I had fractured my knee, she asked me to think about why I had fractured my knee in the first place, since she believes I fractured it for a reason!!!
I think my sister had too much free time on her hands. And two perfectly good knees, so who was she to judge? Who in the hell thinks to themselves, even on a subliminal level, “I’m gonna fall down in the ensuite and fracture my knee because gosh, won’t THAT be fun?” So the hell with my sister! What was I talking about again?
One of your legs get really small and it’s weird. I discovered during that time I had off, that when you can’t put any weight on your leg, it begins to shrink. If you can’t put any weight on it for weeks or months, it shrinks a lot. It’s strange to see. It changes the way you view your body—it can alienate you from your physical self in a way that you haven’t before experienced. You aren’t used to part of yourself being something you don’t recognize as yourself. Before my accident, I always identified myself as healthy and capable. When my knee was fractured and I feel it has reduced to half-size (Bix doesn’t think so) at least in my own mind it had. I had actually begun to mentally detach from the knee—to begin to think of it as “other,” as not part of who I was, because who I am was healthy— but here I had this thing that is also me, and it was completely useless, but was definitely getting better. Am I making sense!!!???
During weeks/months-long recoveries, I had started to worry that I was getting addicted to the pain pills my doctor had been prescribing me. That was because I am was in pain, and the pills were awesome for that. But it was insidious. Was I using the pain killers to get to sleep, or were the pain killers taking the pain away, which was allowing me to get to sleep? Was I using the pills to feel happy, or was I using them to relieve the pain, which freed my mind up to experience happiness? The answer is, I thought, complicated—maybe a combination of both. But it was scary. I didn’t want to get addicted to opiates. I can tell you from experience, the codeine made me feel happy and liked floating on a cloud!!! Plus I was senseless to boot, which is all the time said Bix!!!!!!
I also discovered that one couldn’t just get up and pee during the middle of the night without it being a huge deal.
If you relied on crutches you are pretty much confined to your bed and your favorite chair, like I was. But you can’t ignore your basic needs, which could become difficult when you couldn’t walk. So when I had to wake up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it felt something like:
Here’s what someone with a knee injury had to do when they had to get up in the middle of the night:
1 Move your dead leg meat off the bed
2 Grasp blindly in the dark to find your crutches
3 Lift yourself up with your crutches
4 Crutch to the bathroom
5 Somehow sit down on the toilet without killing yourself*
6 Pee
* For step 5 I had to:
Somehow sit down on the toilet without killing myself—was the worst part. When you can’t bend your knee, you don’t have the coordination required to sit down like a normal person. Instead, I found that recovering from a knee injury, one must position oneself to fall back onto whatever you’re trying to sit on and hope you land in the right spot. This is why the handicap toilet in the bathroom has rails on the adjacent walls: so non-ambulatory people don’t have to crash land into the toilet seat. So, if you have a smallish bathroom, with no rails, using crutches in the middle of the night to get yourself in the right position so that you can fall back onto the toilet without destroying yourself can become a major source of drama and it did on occasion!!!!!!!
When you have a knee injury you lose the use of your hands.
Aside from all the pain, one of the worst aspects of being non-ambulatory and having crutches is that I was essentially useless: my hands were busy controlling my crutches, which were the only means by which I could move around. This seemingly small problem became disastrous when I tried to do basically anything: cooking (as if), cleaning, getting dressed, taking a shower, and getting
into cars.
I couldn’t even open doors without almost falling over—it was a struggle, every time, to keep myself up while shifting my weight forward to reach for the door, balancing on one foot and using the crutches for balance in my armpits,
then shifting back to pull the door open, then actually positioning myself to get into the doorway of the door I just opened. Opening a door with a bag of bits or anything for that matter was next to impossible. You know how when you were young, and used a bike to get around, and would sometimes have to hang a bag on your handlebar? It was difficult to steer because the weight of the bag would
mess with your steering. When you had a bag of stuff (like the one I had to carry from room to room) in your hand and you’re on crutches, it’s exactly like that.
At times I found I couldn’t really focus on being social anymore
When just getting out of a chair was a painful experience, my set of priorities quickly narrowed to:
Things I did to stay alive (eat, go to the bathroom, sleep)
Things that would help me defeat boredom that didn’t cause me physical pain (reading, the internet, Netflix, other people)
For people with knee injuries, things that cause physical pain—such as walking two blocks to a friends house—became commitments (which I wouldn’t do anyway, even I if I was desperate for the company). How bad did I really need to go crutch over to the dining table to sit and eat? How much did I really want to go out on a particular night (even if it was for a drive around the block}? All these thoughts crossed my mind as my knee injury was only undisplaced and not pinned, and mine wasn’t bad for heavens sakes!!!! For people recovering from a bad injury, that’s hardly even a consideration anymore. Everything becomes about the leg.
My wardrobe changed completely.
Pants were no longer an option for me fresh off that knee injury. Chances were, if you had a knee injury that requires active recovery, you’ll really only be able to wear hip-hop size basketball shorts and very loose sweatpants. Honestly, the best option for people with knee injuries, like I had, and after much consideration, is one of these things:
Snuggie
Anything else was impossible to manage.
The wardrobe change had a ripple effect through your entire day-to-day routine. Had my coworkers ever seen me in a pair of sweatpants? Good Lord, I would been mortified if they saw me in sweat pants!!! How comfortable would I have been wearing basketball shorts the next time I went out? I personally would not been seen dead in basketball shorts!!! Most of us want to look nice—most people, I think, feel better, safer, when in control of their appearance in public. That’s often not an option for people with knee injuries.
People saw me suffering. (I’m not used to people who saw me suffer.)
In the first world, suffering is either reserved for entertainment (TV, movies, literature) or kept out of sight, out of mind. I could hardly do anything without Bix’s help—almost everyone, from the doctors receptionist to my next-door neighbour, could see I was suffering. It was all out there!!!!!
I felt a lot of us connect our sense of integrity to our strength, to our ability to be self-reliant. Debilitating knee injuries cut self-reliance out of the equation in a very public way. Bix slowed down for bumps (not that we have many on our roads) because he knew that each time I was jostled a tremendous bolt of pain shot up my leg. Strangers moved out of my way on the sidewalk because they knew I needed all the room I could get. Everyone rushed to open doors for me.
There were times of sarcasm, sure – but angry outbursts are extremely rare for me. Since the injury occurred, I re-mastered the art of the toddler tantrum. I kept punching the air/sofa (note: no humans had been harmed) and I let out the odd cry of desperation. God, was I a drama queen!
Yeah – I was bored, frustrated and gorgeously irritable but it really did put things into perspective and made me think of those who have long-term or life-long problems. It was only a fractured bone for me so, why was I even quibbling???
Anyway, I am exhausted from all this typing and hope I made you both have a laugh in the process.
Safe travels and can you please bring back a bowerbird for me to put in the aviary!!!!!???
Love always bixandlites