Karijini National Park

08/12/10

Karijini National Park was our destination, and with a 5:30am start, we covered plenty of ground before breakfast. It is very abnormal for me, but I do feel such an hour has not been a problem for me at all. I surprise myself sometimes, though with an easy-to-please nature, I doubt that comes as too much of a surprise.

On the way to Karijini we bumped into a masochistic, Japanese cyclist who either had a death wish, or had simply taken a wrong turn in a race a few months ago. His plan was to cycle from Darwin to Perth. That takes over a month…. the nutter! Anyway I’d rather him than me. Our aircon had broken on the bus and that was frustrating enough without cycling in the blazing hot heat. Good luck to him, but I suspect one day soon, some unlikely trucker will find a seemingly abandoned bike surrounded by slightly fattened dingos.

We stopped off for a picnic in the park at Tom Price before entering the Hammersley Gorge for a dip in the pools amongst the striated rocks. It was a beautiful start to the best part of the trip. We caped inside the park itself, only needing a celestial blanket to keep us warm. I’d forgotten how many stars you can see in an Australian night’s sky.

09/12/10

With a day to explore the gorges, it was suggested that we do not go by an itinerary, and just leave each one in turn when we are ready for the next. We started in Weano Gorge amongst its generous beauty and I was pleased to be pretty trigger happy with the camera as what happened next is still painful. We’d finished lunch and were making our way to Hancock Gorge, where again the sheers drops of the cliff provided ample photogenic moments, but when you get to the trough of the valley, it can get quite deep in parts. We’d all given Peter our cameras to store in his trusty dry bag. He bag is fair to call “trusty”, but Peter…. maybe not so much. I think it doesn’t take too much to guess what happened, and obviously I was now camera less. I couldn’t blame Pete though; he’d been a huge highlight of the trip for me. We’d gotten on great right from the off and he has made me laugh right down to the point where my belly can get painful. We just have that overlapping humour, and our banter often provided fun entertainment for the group. I actually felt sorry for him as I knew he’d be feeling terrible about what happened - who wouldn’t right? In a funny way it meant we concentrated more on taking in the sights around us an storing a visual memory rather than an LCD screen, so it wasn’t a complete bad thing. However with that downer in mind, most people didn’t fancy that last hike to Joffre’s Gorge, but I believe that was to their loss. Talk about save the best till last. It was a trickier gorge to climb down, but highly rewarding. We all froze to let a snake run off, before climbing back out via the waterfall at the far end. This and Ningaloo Reef rank alongside the best days of my life!

10/12/10

Dale’s Gorge was our last one to see, but I believe this is the show piece of the park. Once again it was daybreak that woke everyone up, but that gave us an additional amount of time to see the visitor centre and the Aboriginal claims of the land. It was quite uninspiring for me, and I personally was itching to get back amongst the rocks and pools. We strolled over to the lookout for the lesser romantic view of the wider gorge, but as you scale down the ladders and rocks, you quickly learn the charm of the gorge lies upstream where the waterfalls are. The tiered effect can be quite mesmerising and I was happy to swim in the pools for a good few hours.

It’s so nice to lose the concept of time and order, and just eat when hungry; get out of bed at first light; and generally not care for time nor date, as the are simple inconsequential in places like this. I’d like a little more adjustment from the rat race and monotony of the 9-5 regime, but it is hard to impossible to adopt in civilian lifestyle; it’s a shame really.

For the evening…. we got pretty drunk, which in all honesty had been occurring a fair amount on the trip anyway. It gave us a good fun factor to it all, but this would finally give me an overdue sore head. At 3:30am, I finally succumbed to the fatigue of the long, energetic day.