Today was going to be yet another long day in the saddle, we were hoping to put a good few kilometres under our belt before our next stop. Australia is a vast place and if you are travelling by road you have to put the miles in but this is a great way to see the place close up as it where. We got off to a good enough start from the campsite we had reached yesterday when we left Broome and we headed off toward a place called Fitzroy Crossing.
The journey was quite unremarkable but nice enough and when we reached it the town itself was quite a nice one, where we parked up there was a bit of a ‘greenery’ and under a tree there were a few of the local indigenous older men and women. Once again they looked like they may have been drinking and, as if to back this up, when a police car drove by the people under the tree looked very shifty indeed. It seems a great shame along on our travels as we have often been told of the great many subsidies and grants the indigenous people get but I often wonder if anyone ever asked them what it is they really want. They seemed to have lived so very long without the great white man’s intervention and now looking at them, they really look like a people that are beaten down and lost. It is quite heartbreaking really. It seems that whilst Australia wants the Aborigine art and the music and the story because it captures the imagination and is excellent for tourism I am not so sure that Australia really wants the people themselves.
At Fitzroy Crossing we decided to go for a bit of a walk and although there were three to choose from we decided to go for the shortest or least exerting because the day was just so very hot. So off we went to a place called Geikie Gorge but even before we started walking we had to stop and have a bite and a drink but even this small amount of effort caused us to sweat bucket loads. So after our wee bit of sustenance we donned our fly net head covers and off we went.
The walk was quite a nice one with some huge boulders strewn all about it and because of the recent (unbearably) hot temperatures the whole place was dry, arid and desert-like. We could have been walking through a movie set for a cowboy film, the gorge just had that kind of look about it – a great place for a bushwhacking or an ambush! During the stroll we kept seeing some very large white crickets jumping about the place but they were always quicker than me or my camera for that matter, possibly just a bit camera-shy. At one point we even thought that we had sighted a Rock Wallaby but whatever it was, it was just moving too quick to tell and in the blazing heat we were finding it hard to reach moving slow.
After all our exertion we needed another drink or two before we could even think about setting off and then it was another long drive to get us to our next refuge – Halls Creek. Just before hitting the campsite we stopped at yet another extortionately priced petrol station and strangely enough I was wearing my tee shirt from when we were volunteering at Tacloban, which has the Philippines flag on it and funnily enough the petrol pump guy was from the Philippines. He asked me if we had enjoyed his country and about the volunteering, exclaiming that we had done something both good and worthwhile but not did not stop him from charging me full price … Doh! Oh well if he let everyone off who had been to the Philippines I supposed his takings would have dropped somewhat!!!
Once ‘fuelled up’ we made the last dash to our campsite trying to get there before it got dark. We failed miserably yet again in our task and ended up setting up our meagre camp, well sorting our bedding out in the van, whilst it was quite pitch black.Then once we got settled the cows, if that is what they were, tested our nerves with some very strange bellowing sounds. It must have been the influence of what we had seen earlier at Broome but the sounds they were making reminded me that in the dim and distant past dinosaurs probably walked these lands and although the hubbub being made by these noisy animals were a possible tribute to those bygone creatures it did not exactly make for a great night’s sleep!!
Our Excellent Adventure! 