The comments have been pretty slow lately. Hopefully I didn’t offend any of my female readers with my last post. I did have fun with the all girl group, but I was being honest when I said it took a long time to make a decision. Enough of that though, on with the trip.
After spending one night in the new hostel, I was picked up by Paul in his Toyota 4WD. Paul was going to work in Derby as a pilot and had decided to take the Gibb River Road to get there. We headed out from Kununnura and was soon on a dirt road. Non-paved roads in Australia are normally just hard packed, very red, dirt instead of gravel. The terrain was what I had come to expect in this part of Australia, namely small stunted trees, large termite mounds, and large red rocky hills in the distance. The sky was a bit cloudy but no rain was immenent. I haven’t seen rain in nearly a month. The road was surprisingly well maintained and we were able to maintain speeds of between 80 and 100 km/hr for most of the trip. The first major river crossing was the Pentecost River. This river dwarfed any crossing that I had done while 4WDing to date. The water came up nearly to the doors of the SUV which was pretty high off the ground. Later after crossing the river, we turned off to view one of the gorges that line the road. I forget the name of the gorge, but the road there was nothing if not exciting. At one point the vehicle had to clamber over some pretty high rocks. It came slamming down on the other side bending one of the bash plates. We stopped for the night at the campround for Manning Gorge. Upon stopping we found that we had a flat (most people get at least one flat tire from sharp rocks while traveling the road) which we had to get repaired the next day. For the second time in Australia, I set up my tent and then went and had a “refreshing” cold water shower. Since we had no source of hot water, my supper that night consisted of a sandwich that I had bought earlier, power bars, and apples. Paul subsisted off of crackers and cheese. [read on]
cjun