Month: August 2017

We had to get up quite early as our tour started at 6:50 am. We boarded a 4WD bus with a bunch of about thirty Grey Nomads (that’s how the retired people which travel / backpack are called in Australia). So, we were the youngsters among the group. It was a fairly 1,5 hour ride over unsealed gravel road through some dips and small bumps until we finally arrived in the Purnululu National Park Visitor Center. The National Park is listed as Unesco World Heritage site. We then drove another 45 minutes to the southern part where we had morning tea before we could do several walks on our own through the Bungle Bungles, some uniquely patterned stone formations in the form of behives. They were really georgeous.

After lunch break the bus took us to the northern part, which has a different landscape. This was another good one hour ride on unsealed roads. On the destination spot we made a lovely walk through some kind of canyon with intensive orange-red colors and plenty of palm trees. It got very narrow in the end, so you touch both sides of the wall at the same time.

For this day only the road was our show as we only needed to get from Fitzroy Crossing to Purnululu National Park where our day tour started the next morning. It was a drive of about four hours in total. We made two stops and some nice rest areas which we had been told they were nice to visit because of their beautiful location and nice views.
In Halls Creek we stopped at the visitor center because they have free WiFi (which you don’t find a lot in Western Australia, rarely on any campsite and even less in National Parks). There is a nice cafe where we had some delicious iced chocoloate with cream.

From Broome we left in the morning driving to Fitzroy Crossing with the aim to take the 4 pm boat tour on the Fitzroy River in the Geikie Gorge National Park. On the way we saw again a lot of boab trees (a big one next to some termite hills can be seen on the photo). We also came across a big road train with a total of four wagons.

We were happy to take the small boat with around 12 people as their big boat was already filled up with two busses full of grannies. The tour took a hour and was really nice. The gorge has some interesting formations of limbstone and some intensive orange-brown colors. The guide shared a lot of information about the geology and history as well as some Aboriginal culture background.
We also passed by plenty of freshwater crocodiles which were lying on the shore. Some quickly vanished into the water when the boat came closer – they seem to be a bit more shy than their fellow saltwater brothers.

We are still having a really great time here in Broome. The weather is nearly perfect, sometimes a bit windy at definitely too hot around lunch-time to be in the sun. So swimming in the sea is mandatory. 🙂 Yesterday night were some heavy storms which blew over our campsite and were shaking up our campervan. But now it has calmed down again.

Yesterday evening we went to Matso’s Broome Brewery, a local craft beer brewery. We had a tasting with a total of 10 different beer we shared together. There were some specialities such as chili beer (very spicy) and mango beer. Some tasted really good and very interesting.

Our campsite neighbours had some really interesting insect sitting on their camping table in the morning. Some big green thing looking like a combination of a tree trunk and a leaf. The guy took it on his hand (see photo) and relocated it to a tree later.

The following day we spent another day at the beautiful Cable Beach and enjoyed a swim in the sea. It was quite windy (and thus only few folks were on the beach) but we chose a spot a the very top of the beach next to the dunes where it was qualm enough to relax and warm up in the sun. For lunchtime we went by car to the port and had some really nice local fish and baked oysters there while enjoying the view on the jetty / harbour bay area.

For the night we decided to go to the movies once again in the charming Sun Pictures Cinema Gardens to watch the Amazing Spiderman. The wind was still blowing so it was fairly cold sitting there after a while although we had put on long trousers and a sweater. The movie was solid entertainment.

We arrived in Broome – a small little town next to the sea which is occupied by many tourists, mainly from Asutralia. Broome is really cool. We have been to the oldest still operating outdoor cinema, called Sun Pictures and we saw “Despicable Me 3”. The beach and the sea is totally awesome – we enjoyed sun bathing and swimming. Today we also did a camel ride on the beach. That was really fun!

From the free campsite just shortly behind Kununurra where we had stayed the night we moved on to Halls Creek. The first stop was the visitor center, where a very friendly woman gave us plenty of helpful tips and hints for sights and activities on our way to Broome as there was not that much to see in Halls Creek.

We went to see a nice little wall made of big rock, which they call “The Chinese Wall 2”.

In Fitzroy Crossing where we arrived late in the afternoon (and too late to take the last boat tour in the Geikie Gorge National Park) we nevertheless drove the 20-30 minutes on the road into the park and made a small bush walk through some really nice landscape. We saw plenty of wallabies (small kangaroos) which were jumping through the grass and bush, a bit shy and scared when they saw or heard us. Thus after jumping away a few meters they often turned around and looked at us – so curiosity seems to be part of their nature, too.

In Timber Creek we had stayed in the campsite of an roadhouse next to the highway, where we had arrived already in the dark the evening before, so there was not much to choose regarding the stay for the night. Nevertheless we were quite happy as the powered site was only 25 A$ per night, the cheapest of that kind we had so far.
The next day we left for Kununurra. There was actually not much to do although the girl from the visitor center advertised every tiny attraction of the town as it was super cool to see / do it.

So we went to the local park, which was quite nice and had a big boab tree.
Furthermore we went to a local rum distillery where we tasted four different rums. A flavored one was really good, but all of them were only aged for three years and they were very expensive starting with 70 A$ up to a couple of hundred dollars.

Before sunset we went to the waterfront of a lagoon which had a nice picnic area and some free barbecue facilities. We had some delicious kangaroo sausages, corn cobs and baked potatoes.

We did some hiking trip for about four hours through bushland, did some detour to a little waterhole and finally we arrived at two very nice viewpoints with georgeous views into the gorge.

On our way to Edith Falls we made a short stop in a little town called Pine Creek to buy some beer in the local bottle shop and to visit the small but interesting railway museum.

In Edith Falls we made a hike to a natural rock pool with waterfall where we went for some extended swimming. That was really nice, the water was perfect, really clean and clear.

hiking & boats tour