Getting There

After three days of paddling down the Ord river, our deltoids were rippling as we headed westward out of Kunnunurra. Our upper bodies had had their workout and now it was time for a bit of legwork. At the highway junction we turned south - we were off to the Purnululu National Park to do a bit of walking. Purnululu is home to the Bungle Bungle, an area of strangely eroded rocky ranges that was virtually unknown until 1983, but World Heritage listed twenty years later. It is, arguably, the jewel in the crown of the Kimberley.

All went smoothly until 5 minutes after we left the highway onto the 52km dirt access road to the National Park. Some serious scraping noises were emanating from beneath the HiLux every time the road became slightly uneven. We stopped to investigate and discovered the sump guard bent back and only a few centimetres off the ground.

While we were inspecting the problem, a ute pulled up and John, a silver-haired bush character and part-time good samaritan, got out. With his large toolkit, he found the right socket (which we didn't have) and we ran the front wheels of the vehicle up onto the verge to give him access to remove the sump guard. A close look showed that one of the mounting brackets and its bolt were missing and there was an old tear in the metal - clearly the sump had been damaged during a prior rental and had been replaced without being properly fixed!!

We kept it to show the rental company and gave John a cold beer for his troubles - like all good samaritans of the bush he refused anything else; the pleasure of being able to help someone in need was enough. There should be more people like him in the world - thanks, John!!

Apart from that incident, the infamous 52km drive into Purnululu passed uneventfully, which was a mild surprise. We had been led to believe that this road was a sump-busting, sand-bogging tiger, but found it more of a feral cat. Yes, there are corrugations, creek crossings and a roller-coaster section with blind crests and bends through the hilly country, but it required nothing more than commonsense and your undivided attention to negotiate. I suspect we were fortunate that the grader had only passed by a few weeks earlier when the road was opened after the wet season, so perhaps with heavy traffic in peak tourist time it becomes a more formidable challenge. The moral is "come early".

That said, it passes through the very interesting countryside of Mabel Downs cattle station before entering the National Park. Upon arrival, we registered, then made a quick detour to Kungkalanayi Lookout to get our first good look at the Bungle Bungle Range in the low afternoon light and set up camp beneath a shady tree in Kurrajong Campground.

Our plan was to look at the northern end of the range first, so we drove the 13km to the start of the Mini-Palms Walk for our first view. Driving up the stony creekbed cum road, we were greeted by the rich orange-red and black rock cliffs for which this region is famous. The track itself led us across a flat area of tall flowering spinifex, dotted with eucalypts and wattles, from whose golden flower spikes wafted a subtle sweet scent. Half a kilometre further on the track joined up with the creek flowing out of Mini-Palms Gorge and we crunched up its stony bed. We could feel the heat of the Kimberley sun, even this early in the morning, as we passed a landscape of spinifex, young eucalypts and outlying rocky outcrops.

On the stony creek bed leading into Mini-Palms Gorge

Soon we reached the mouth of the gorge, guarded by 200m high red cliffs and the first fan palms. Entry to the gorge was negotiated by passing a jumble of large conglomerate boulders, then wending our way along a narrow path that wound upward and emerged into a broad circular opening. Here we were surrounded by tall orange cliffs and a lush almost rainforest vegetation. It was a spectacular sight, but the best lay ahead.

A bit more climbing, aided by the odd steel steps, took us up into the narrow higher section of the gorge to reveal a magnificent amphitheatre at its far end. The grey floor of the amphitheatre lay beneath us, bare apart from a scattering of low shrubs and the dwarfed palms for which this place is named, while at its far end was a shallow cave. All around, the sheer red vaulted walls soared upwards for some 150m to the sky above. It was easy to see why this is a sacred place for the local aboriginal people. We stopped for a while to absorb the atmosphere of this silent chamber, then retraced our steps.

Re-caffeinated, we checked our watches and set off, up the rocky creek bed to the narrow entry of the chasm, fringed with more fan palms and lush vegetation. This rapidly disappeared, however, as we pushed on into the chasm; the walls narrowed dramatically to created a dark shadowy corridor deep in the Bungle Bungle Range. Ahead a bright slit of light appeared, guiding us on. We followed the narrow corridor on into a wider chamber lit by sunlight reflected off the rock walls, where we joined a small group of people waiting for the sun. This was the point of our timing - we all sat transfixed in a pale pink light watching a small band of sunlight appear, then move until it filled the narrow floor of the chasm at 11.30am, 180m below the opening above. It was celestial noon! To fully appreciate Echidna Chasm, timing is everything.

From this chamber, an even narrower section of the gorge peeled off and we followed the dark passage past large blocks of conglomerate rock, climbing steadily up a section of chasm that was at its widest only two metres and at its narrowest, less than one metre wide. Above us, boulders that had fallen were wedged between the two walls of the dark chasm.

Exiting the chasm, we made a slight but well worthwhile detour to a lookout on a rocky knob - it looked back at the opening of Echidna Chasm, but more interestingly, presented a superb panorama across the tree cover valley of Red Rock Creek to the Osmand Ranges in the north. The rocks of this range are over 1.6 billion years old, some of the oldest exposed rocks on the planet and five times older than the Bungle Bungle. If you really want to put our civilisation in perspective, take a long hard look at the Osmand Range.

Panorama of the northern Bungle Bungle with the Osmand Range in the background

Setting out from the carpark, we retraced our steps of yesterday for a kilometre up the Cathedral Gorge track, before heading off up the bed of Picaninny Creek, a wide dry watercourse that only flows during the wet season. The bed of the creek was an uneven pale sandstone slab, shaped by the flash floods and flows of the wet season rains. Around us, in all directions, lay the classic bichromic domes of the Bungle Bungle, as we headed eastward up this sandstone road. A cool breeze blew down the creek and the early morning light was superb.

As we wandered along, we could see in the soft white sand the tracks of the creatures that had passed before; birds of varying sizes, small and large reptiles, a snake, the tiny scurryings of insects and erratic paths of ant-lions wandering between the inverse volcanic cones of their pit traps, the prints of a large kangaroo or of a small hopping marsupial or desert mouse, a dingo - fascinating stuff, sand! The region may appear barren, but it clearly teems with life. We followed a goanna track for several hundred metres before it veered off into the surrounding spinifex.

Picaninny Creek is so named because in aboriginal mythology the eroded domes are the "babies" of the mountains. All along its course we wandered by these curiously shaped orange/black "babies", as we followed the creek upstream. The river bed itself was curiously eroded into sinkholes, tables, deep channels and furrows. In places, a few waterholes still lingered, home to populations of small fish (but for how long?) and a source of brilliantly reflected colour from the all-pervasive domes on either bank. Pale green spinifex covered the flatter areas of the creek banks and the occasional splash of brighter green signalled the presence of a small soak.

Occasionally, high on the beehives or in a nook on their eroded sides, we could see tall statuesque shapes. In Asia, these would be buddhas, in Latin America, they would be statues of the virgin - here they were the mounds of termites, those magnificent architects and builders of the Australian outback.

Thus we continued for several kilometres until the creek butted up against the southern edge of the Bungle Bungle Range, forcing it into a series of horseshoe bends as it deflected its way between the large rock outcrops.

Erosion had carved deep circular cuttings to produce sheer-walled red cliffs at each bend with deep pale grey channels at their bases - magnificent! At one bend, we passed a particularly inviting rockpool - long, clear, sandy and in the shade - and made a mental note of it for the return journey.

The riverbed now began to change, with increasingly long sections of deep gravel and rounded river stones or soft white sand. Our progress slowed considerable as we crunched or trudged through them. A couple of times, we stayed high on the bank, following a faint path across the spinifex flats to avoid them.

Penetrating deeper into the range, we came across a group of walkers who had just spent three nights camping in and exploring the higher part of the gorge - they looked, tired, hot, sweaty and very, very content! Another stretch of gravel and sand brought us to The Elbow, a place where the creek makes a sharp dogleg to the north and the true Picaninny Gorge begins. We followed the creekbed up the gorge for half a kilometre, enough to look into its depths and appreciate its sheer-sided walls and richly vegetated floor.

We left at 11.30am - celestial noon - to return, and the day was quickly heating up. However, we had a particular stop in mind and the passage along the hot, gravelly creekbed passed quickly until we reached our waterhole with its small and private sandy beach beneath a rock ledge. For us sand was beginning to mean siesta. So, after an invigorating dip in the glacial waters of the pool, we lay on the sand and dozed, listening to the sweet haunting melody of a pied butcherbird echo off the walls of the rock cirque above. Sometimes you wonder if it can get any better.

It can, however, always get worse and we finally had to push on for the remaining 7 km in the hot afternoon sun of the Kimberley, seeking out the rare shade of south-facing rockwalls or scurrying, like the ants beneath us, along the baking sandstone of the exposed riverbed.

The sight of our campervan at the track's end was a welcome one indeed.