Yesterday afternoon I started feeling a bit itchy on the palms, (supposedly a sign that you will soon come into money) and the itchiness soon spread to my whole body. That evening I was watching TV and felt my lips getting bigger. They soon got so big that I had difficulty talking properly. I got some antihistamines from the chemist but they seemed to have no effect. In the morning my lips were as puffy as ever and I took a different type of antihistamine. Within an hour the swelling started to drop and it was completely gone by late afternoon.

Unfortunately the only photo I took was just before going to the chemist and this was not at the height of the problem. I didn’t eat anything strange or come into contact with strange substances so I still don’t know what caused it.

Judy has received one of these letters and sent me the addresses. They are now on the David Rhodes page.  It seems the more names I get sent and the more I mention it, the more hits I get and the more names I get.

This subject continues to be the source of the greatest number of hits on my site.

These things seem to come in waves. Coming home from holidays last weekend, I found that someone had left a note on the web site with a list of names from a David Rhodes letter they had received (See early post). When I checked through the snail mail sent over the last three weeks, there was the tell-tale hand written envelope with the bulge of a 5-cent piece in it. The names from this letter have also been added to the David Rhodes page.

The hovercraft ride was short but informative. The 20 year old craft glided gracefully across the beach and across Roebuck Bay on a smooth cushion of air. The bay is very calm and the high tide means that the bay is a vast mud flat twice a day. We crossed just after the peak of high tide (with a 10m tidal range) and the water was dropping noticeably. Across the other side of the bay we looked at sand and soils deposited when the Fitzroy River had originally flowed out to sea at this spot. It was also the site of the fossilised footprints of herbivorous dinosaurs. Once it was pointed out what they looked like, we were finding them everywhere. The guide says it is the only place in the world to see them, but a quick google search showed otherwise.

The red sands of the beach were alive with crabs scurrying around with a variety of shells of their backs picking up the detritus left behind by the receding tide. The tour itself was a special one put on for a cruise ship that was visiting Broome, but we managed to grab two spare seats. the bus back to the hotel went via the wharf where the ship was rapidly dropping below the level of the wharf.

We spent the early part of the evening back at Matsos’s tasting the remainder of the home brews and sampling a variety of Mr P’s fabulous curries. The flight from Broome to Perth was late, but this was a good thing. Since our flight from Perth had been delayed by two hours, the wait at Perth was shorter than it might otherwise have been. We are back in a big city and already parts of the holiday are like a distant memory. Tonight we will be back in Sydney and the mad pace that we call a normal life.

Five minutes ago we should have been off on a sea-plane flight, jet boat ride and lunch on a pontoon at the horizontal waterfall. Forty five minutes before departure they rang to say the trip was cancelled due to insufficient bookings. the only other other company that does it had no vacancies and so we have substituted a hovercraft tour this afternoon. It is very disappointing not to see the horizontal waterfall, but we will have to wait until we next return to Broome.

A late night after a day of serendipitous meetings. We walked into town this morning and sampled the shopping. Broome is famous for its pearls and has more pearl shops per head of population than Berrima has pottery shops. Although the vast majority of the shops are catering for tourists, it doesn’t seem touristy and presents itself in a more upmarket and less tacky way than somewhere like Cairns.

Having the luxury of staying several nights we decided to relax and spent several hours reading books by the swimming pool. At around 4 o’clock we caught the bus to the other side of town to the Sunset Bar at Cable Beach to, you guessed it, watch the sunset. We had a few beers and cocktails and as the sun approached the horizon I ducked down to the beach with my camera and tripod to capture the light show.

While taking photos I got talking to ‘Des’ a very healthy looking 82 year old who told me that when he was 64 he married a 36 year old and that had helped him to stay young, along with (apparently) generous amounts of cigarettes and alcohol. He saved his introduction for when he was leaving and when I said my name was ‘AJ” he said ‘Good work son, when you’re travelling never tell anyone your real name.’ I am still not sure of the reason for this sage advise,

I continued taking photos after the sun had gone down and when I returned to the bar, Sue had been joined by two men. John was someone Sue works with at BT and his friend Terry was a local Broome celebrity who everyone in the bar seemed to know. He also introduced us to Lionel who is a big mover and shaker in the WA radio business and we were later joined by Chris and Cameron. By the end of the night I was left wondering if Sue and I were the only straight couple in Broome.

After another drink or two we bid our farewells and wandered off in the general direction of our motel, although it was too far to walk and the bus service had stopped. We spied a nice looking cafe and stopped for a lovely dinner before getting a taxi home, which at 10 o’clock was the latest night of our holiday so far. (Camping generally leads to early nights)

We are in the Moonlight Bay Suites which are located at the far end of the main street of Broome, about a ten minute walk from the action. We left Derby this morning after having a quick look at the highlights of the town. there was a semi-circular jetty which is still part of an active working port and therefore inaccessible to the public. The old Derby lockup is a rusty series of cages used to house prisoner awaiting trial. Designed to hold about 40 people, it sometimes held up to 160 and was still in use up to 1972. The cage had a roof but was only enclosed on one side. the shower and toilet facilities were out in the open and visible from the road. Some people lived in this cage for up to three months. Considering these were the conditions for people yet to be tried, many innocent people would have had to endure these deprivations. But in a time where being a blackfella was almost a crime in itself, the lockup is a stark reminder of the cruel and unequal way in which whitefella justice was imposed on the original inhabitants of this land. Derby still feels like a frontier town and there was nothing that could induce me to stay another night. We found a geocache just outside of town at the sewage treatment plant. In a town that is desperately short of attractions, they have an elevated viewing platform over the treatment ponds. Although ostensibly for bird-watching, concerned locals could also pop down to ensure that the remains of last night’s dinner had been successfully delivered. The final attraction of Derby was the Prison Boab Tree. This is a hollow boab that was used to hold prisoners in transit between Derby and elsewhere. With two prisons and a shitworks in the top three attractions it is easy to see why Derby is not on the top of everyone’s list of holiday destinations.

Near the prison tree was Derby’s final claim to fame - the longest cattle trough in the southern hemisphere. Now the trough looks like any other trough, but a bit longer, about 120 metres long. So it’s big, but not that big. Anyone could easily build one bigger but I guess the world has decided to leave Derby with at least one thing it can be proud of.

Although only 220km from Derby to Broome, we took the trip at a slow pace. The spare tyre with the slow leak had been pumped back up, but now the front right tyre had developed a split in the side wall. I marked the size of the split with a pen and checked it each time we stopped. We made it into Broome without blowing another tyre. We checked into the hotel then cleaned the vehicle, hosing off half a tonne of red dirt and returned it a day early. Being fully insured we were reimbursed for the cost of the tyre repairs and returning the vehicle was a much easier process with friendlier and more professional staff than at the Darwin office.

We returned to the hotel and went across the road to the restaurant which also had a brewery attached. Sue had a mango beer and a chilli beer which was the hottest beer I had ever tasted. I had the ‘Smokey Bishop’, which is a dark ale, as well as a very tasty porter. The food was also excellent and was the perfect way to introduce ourselves to this new town.

We entered Derby just off dusk and saw a neon sign saying “King Sound Resort Hotel”. This looked good we thought. Parts of the sign were clearly missing as the full name of the place was “F*#King Unsound Last Resort Hotel.”
The car is parked in the lock-up compound out the back which is surrounded by razor wire. All of the windows of the hotel are covered by security grills that have a fly screen, but are clearly designed to keep out more than flies. Reception shuts at 1830 with the counter locked up like Fort Knox and big signs saying “You are now under video surveillance”. It doesn’t endear you to the town. First impressions are that Derby hasn’t had enough cyclones. Its main claim to fame is that it has the second highest tides in the world at 12.4 metres. The highest in the world is in Nova Scotia at 14.2 metres. If Derby had tides like that, the town might be inundated and we could all give the town up as a bad idea. Derby is so unattractive that the motel room has a large picture of a northern hemisphere mountain range on the wall. Apparently nothing local could provide a suitable photo.
We just finished dinner where we paid silly prices to be served poor food by a humourless waiter. My meal was cold and had to be sent back, while Sue’s was almost too salty to eat. The restaurant had the ambiance of a caravan park laundry, but without the rustic charm.
So why the hell would anyone go to Derby? Well, apart from being the ‘Gateway to the Gorges’ (ie the town at one end of the Gibb River Road), it is also the take off point for the Horizontal Waterfall. This is a phenomena whereby the rising tide flows into a lake through a narrow passage and the water builds up on the side that the tide is coming from. The differential in the water levels causes a waterfall effect. We will try to see this tomorrow and get out of Derby as quickly as possible.
After leaving Napier Creek, we took off for Wandjana Gorge. We arrived soon after 0800 and started walking along the gorge. There were about 25 freshwater crocodiles basking on the riverside and we managed to get within a couple of metres of them to take some good photos. We continued for a couple of kilometres along the gorge and found some hand stencils and some small figures drawn in ochre. On the way home we ran into several hundred bats roosting in some riverside trees.
The next stop was Tunnel Creek, which was a 750m walk through an underground creek which had some freshwater crocodiles skulking around the tunnel. We spent some time here playing with long exposure photos in the darkness of the tunnel. the road from Tunnel Creek joined the main highway, but we turned left at the end and drove 42km to Fitzroy Crossing to pump some air into the spare. We stopped at the first service station on the outside of town and headed straight back out.
We never got to see the charm of Fitzroy Crossing that appealed so much to the Warumpi Band.
the drive from Fitzroy Crossing to Derby (258km) was completed non-stop to arrive before sun down. The setting sun painted a thin band of clouds on the horizon a mixture of orange and violet hues. We hoped that this beautiful sunset would be a portent of the beauty of the town of Derby. How wrong we were.

I have just finished changing the tyre. (Hang on you did that last entry! Well you just have to keep doing it till you get it right.)

We left Imitji with our repaired tyre as the spare and pumped some extra air into the previous spare which was now our back right tyre. It had only 18 psi in it when it needed more like 40. We figured it hadn’t been filled correctly when it was fixed. We continued on to Bell Gorge where a 1km hike found us at a delightful little pool at the top of a 20m waterfall and an even bigger pool. A small rock island in the middle of the pool was the basking place for a water monitor. I waded out into the chest deep water, camera held aloft and managed to sneak close enough to get some good photos before it slipped into the water and gracefully glided away.

Our destination for the evening was now Windjana Gorge, but it was still a long way off. Crossing over the King Leopold Ranges we stopped to find the first and only geocache on the Gibb River Road. After this it was a race between us and the sun. Driving after dark in these parts is not recommended (I prefer not to drive later than roo o’clock) and finding a campsite in the dark is a hassle.

Just as the sun hit the horizon, we found a small area off the side of the road where we could park for the night. We were able to eat dinner before complete darkness descended. We awoke this morning to see the van at a distinct lean. The tyre that has been ’repaired’ (for want of another term) at Mornington, and had been pumped back to 40psi at Imitji, had gone down too much to safely drive on. Hence another tyre change. The nearest tyre repair or service station of any sort is Derby, about 130km away. We still plan to go to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek (a detour off the Derby road) and hope the ranger at Windjana has a pump or compressor with which to pump up the tyre. It is my opinion that a small compressor should be included with the vehicle (I have one in my car) and then we could have plugged it into the cigarette lighter that doesn’t work.

We are waiting for the flat tyre to get fixed. It hasn’t taken two days, it’s another tyre. The one we blew going into Mornington was duly repaired and so we had the piece of mind of having a spare while we explored the park. There are two gorges in the park, Dimond Gorge and Sir John Gorge. Both are on the Fitzroy River and there is a waterhole on the way to each gorge. Mornington itself is owned and run by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a not-for-profit organisation that buys land incorporating important habitats and ecosystems. Mornington is home to the Gouldian Finch and a host of other savannah bird life.

There is a lot of research being done on this former cattle station station and the beneficial effects of de-stocking (of cattle horses and donkeys) and having a more controlled fire regime have been substantial. Several previously endangered species are showing signs of recovering to healthy populations. There are thousands of termite mounds on Mornington and an average mound consumes as much spinifex and contains as much protein as a male wallaroo. Termites are the primary grazers in the Savannah. The termites are able to digest cellulose and wood because of the microflora in their guts. There can be as many as one billions of the microorganisms per millimetre of gut. Each termite mound holds up to one millions termites. The tiny size of the microorganisms and the sheer number of them (and the termites) is mind blowing. Each of the roads in the park has track notes that are very comprehensive and informative. The diversity of habitat and species and the changes that can occur within the space of a few metres are phenomenal.

After staying two nights in the safari tent, with couldn’t slum it in the car the third night, so we decided to move on. The road out was just as bumpy as it was on the way in and the draw in the back of the van kept opening (even after being taped shut). The draw would slide open going around a right hand curve and close on the left hand curve. I soon perfected a technique whereby with a deft flick of the steering wheel I could close the drawer at will. Twenty kilometres from the main road we blew another tyre and had to change it in the blazing heat. The tyre itself was too hot to touch for more than a second at a time and that proved a challenge. The other challenge was the jack. It was just the right size to fit neatly under the designated jacking point ONLY IF THE TYRE IS FULLY INFLATED. This forces you to use another lifting pointand at full reach there is only a couple of millimetres clearance between the tyre and the road. To get the new tyre on, I had to dig a hole in the road to get enough clearance. We took the remaining 20km at a cautious pace, followed by another 25km on the Gibb River Road to the next roadhouse, which luckily provided tyre reapirs on Sundays. We are now thinking of spending our spare day in Derbyand flying out to see the horizontal waterfall. This is the beauty of a flexible itinerary.