Day 45 - Victoria River Roadhouse to El Questro

I was awake for dawn, so I engaged the camera

 

After an efficient break camp, we all had a look at the Victoria River. It isn't flowing, all the fish are waiting for the wet season to reinvigorate it.

 

Then we were off, eating a final apple each before we crossed the border.


Just before the border we turned right to go and see the Nganalam aboriginal rock art site in the Keep River National Park. All the signs for it were scratched or blackened out, we will have to find out why, though I'm not sure how.


Next was the below quarantine station, a compulsory stop for all vehicles. We double checked there was no stray oranges around the fridge before going through. The inspector told us the main pest they are trying to stop entering the Kimberley region is the silver leaf whitefly. We gave up our honey as it hadn't been sufficiently heat treated, WA has more stringent processes. If there was a sign welcoming us to Western Australia, we missed it. .

 

 

Justin put our car clock back 2 hours to local time. All our other time keeping devices automatically updated luckily, so we could see we needed to adjust the car clock forward half an hour. This is more confusing that daylight saving. It will get dark around 6pm now, and light just after 5 am. This could really change the Shumacks' sleeping habits, stay posted.


I had asked Hilary, whom we met at Tjaynera Falls, if there was anything worth seeing in Kununurra, as her son lives there. She said "The Dam out of town, but there is nothing much in Kununurra". I wasn't sold on the idea, but we turned off for a 68km detour, as we had spent next to no time not going to the Aboriginal art site at Keep River. What a discovery! What Hilary had loosely described as a dam is Australia's largest artificial lake, called Lake Argyle. You can do two day boat tours on this body of water!

 

Its usual storage volume is 5,797,000 megalitres, in the wet season this can increase to over ten million megalitres. Kununurra was just a practical town for us, we got a few supplies and some advice from the tourist information centre. Just out of town across the River Orde is this crane bridge. We are still not sure of its purpose.

 

Below is our rig at the start of the Gibb River Road. We hope to show you a similar photo of it in one piece at the other end.

 

We arrived at El Questro at 4pm local time, and after snapper and salads we were all asleep by 9pm.

 

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