Kununurra

I am still very much in the "zone" from my time in Broome and it's hard not compare. Gorgeous coastal wonderland versus inland mining town, I'm sorry but the coast wins hands down. They just have it together whereas here in Kununurra they are still trying. Don't get me wrong this place is not without it's charms. It's just the bench mark has been set so extraordinarily high that there is nowhere that I know of that comes close except for maybe the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland.

I am staying in a cabin in Caravan Park on the shores of Ord River that feeds in to Lake Argyle. It has a sensational view out the front window. Look at the sunrise I got this morning (I know what the hell was I doing up at sunrise?).

I had to be ready for my flight over the Bungle Bungles which departed at 9.00am (8.15am pick up). This was a pretty slick operation. Everything ran like clockwork, the pilot was excellent if somewhat over worked. She flew us over Lake Argyle and the Bungle Bungles then had to drive us back to our accommodation in a bus, it kind of took away some of the magic. 

Lake Argyle is the site of the world's largest diamond mine by production (but not value). The story behind how it got started is an interesting one. The original owners had been contracted to explore the area for uranium (of which they found none). They did however find some diamonds, which they conveniently forgot to mention. They checked their contract and found they were under no obligation to advise the company that had engaged them that they had found diamonds. Instead they set up a dummy diamond mine 100 kilometres away and 2 hours after the mining lease had expired on the area they were contracted to search for uranium in they registered their own lease and announced to the world they had found the largest deposit of diamonds ever discovered in Australia. 

However the real purpose of the trip was to see the Bungle Bungles, if I wanted to see a mine I could look out my back door. They were only known to the land's original inhabitants, a few pastoralists and some helicopter pilots until after a documentary on them aired in 1983. Again they were rediscovered almost by accident. In 1982 a film crew was in the area making a documentary on the Wolfe Creek Crater. They met a helicopter pilot in the pub who asked them if they were doing anything on the Bungle Bungles. The film crew had never heard of them. The next day they set out with the pilot to check them out and a one hour documentary was made. Since then the rest of the world has slowly got to hear of them. Prior to that they were essentially unknown. They are breathtaking in both their size, their patterns and their colour. The pictures below really don't do them justice.

I will include a professional shot below to try to show them in a more realistic fashion.

This was taken out of a helicopter and has no windows tinting the view and a lot less turbulence shaking the camera. Not to mention it doesn't bring back memories of air sick passengers and whinging old people. They were pretty damn impressive but after my trip to the Horizontal Falls it was hard to compete.

As a sidebar I note that only two people have looked at the Horizontal Falls post. It was without a doubt the highlight of the trip, closely followed by the whale sharks, but if you want to catch a whiff of what was truly a mind blowing experience go to the Horizontal Falls page and at least check out the pictures. 

The afternoon saw me head out to Wyndham, a mere 100 clicks from here, to check out the meeting of the five rivers as they flow in to the Cambridge Gulf. All pretty spectacular stuff.

The King, the Durack, the Pentecost, the Ord and the Forrest rivers all converge here before flowing out through the gulf and into the Timor Sea.

I have booked a cruise on Lake Argyle tomorrow before I head out to Darwin and Kakadu the following day. I thought I would chill on the water a bit before I did another one of those 800 kilometre drives. I think I wind the clock forward 1.5 hours when I cross over into the Northern Territory (it's only 34 k's from here) so that will no doubt confuse the plans as well. As they say time waits for no man.