The end of the bitumen

20-21 May, Wyndham

We have been scratching our heads over whether to stay at Kununurra or Parry’s Farm outside of Wyndham to allow the dust from the Gibb River bike challenge to settle and to prepare for our own assault on the GRR. Eventually we settle upon Parry’s farm, which is quite close to Parry’s Lagoon, a beautiful water lily speckled wetland haven for an amazing variety of birds. Beth and I have been here before and are very excited to be returning. Unfortunately despite S’s superior solar systems, his van batteries are indicating that they are about to expire, so S&C decide to head to Kununurra to seek out replacements and catch up with us later at Parry’s, which means that they avoided the conflagration into which we were thrust. Controlled burns are fairly common up here early in the dry season whist vegetation is still a bit green and there is a low likelihood of things getting out of control. Downside of this approach is that generally there is a lot of smoke associated with even modest burns. As we approached Wyndham we saw smoke billowing on the horizon and assumed it was one of these controlled burns. As we got closer to our destination it seemed as though the fire and us were converging, in fact it didn’t seem as though, we were indeed converging. By the time we reached the road to the caravan park the flames were almost licking at the side of the car and the smoke was thick. On the side of the road was a fire crew, and we stopped to ask if it was ok to proceed. “Yep, no worries”, was the answer. Beth needed more than that. She needed to know whether the smoke will have dissipated enough by the morning so that we could go to the bird observatory, she also needed to know whether this controlled burn would upset the birds, and finally she needed to know whether the smoke would upset our sleep or prevent us from hanging out washing. The indigenous member of the fire crew provided the answer. “Fire, he be gone long time that way by morning”. There were no further answers forthcoming.

As it turns out, neither the flames nor the smoke caused us any concern. During our stay we managed three visits to the bird observatory. A midday, a dusk and a dawn visit. Each was a little different, but all were very beautiful. The most eventful though was the dawn visit where C spotted a crocodile, and as we were watching, it decided to make breakfast of a poor unsuspecting water bird. Quite a thing to see.

The Parry Farm caravan park is an interesting place. The map they gave us of available sites suggested a very neat arrangement delineated by roads. Once we got to the park though we realised that the roads were imaginary and the site delineation non existent. As a consequence of course, there were vans parked all over the place. Upon talking to a couple of campers it became clear that there were several views as to what constituted a road, and the teller of the story was always the one with the correct view, and all the others were damn fools. We proceeded to make fools of ourselves according to our interpretation of the road and when S arrived, he had a different interpretation again. Luckily they weren’t even close to fully booked, so laissez faire parking was not really a big deal.

Wyndham is an interesting little port town with no particular claim to fame other than its giant concrete crocodile, its port facility, and its indigenous folk keen to sell us a carved boab nut. We succumbed to one such seller outside of the supermarket. We are now $25 poorer, but the proud owner of a boab nut that I have no idea what we are going to do with. One other thing that Wyndham should be famous for is its supermarket. I am sure that it is in the Guinness book of records for the most expensive mushrooms ever sold. $28 a kilo for just ordinary mushrooms. Oh well, celery was cheap (who knows why), so we got about a kilo of celery and 2 mushrooms and various other things to prepare us for our assault on the GRR.

Our GRR adventure is still uncertain as the road to Mitchell falls is still closed with no clear date for its opening. C, as the only unretired member of our party, has a flight booked from Broome on 6th June to head back to work, so we have a hard deadline to do as much as we can on the GRR in 2 weeks.