Day 46 - Purnululu - Bungle Bungle National Park (north end)

Wednesday, 14 July 2021

How do you capture this? Johan asks, clutching his camera with awe and bewilderment.

The more pressing question is how to position your head. Lean it back and your jaw opens in utter awe at the grandeur above you. But if you don’t bend it forward, you’ll end up tripping on one of the multi-sized rocks strewn on the path into the gorge. I try a gooseneck approach, up and down, up and down, but it makes me dizzy. I note that many trail travellers are opting for keeping their eyes on the trail. Nothing worse than falling flat on your face with a stream of trekkers behind you. I settle on the stop-start approach. Walk a few metres, eyes on the ground. Stop, look up and gawk.

So then it’s back to Johan’s question: how can you capture this? You can’t, I reply. Photographers and writers have tried forever to capture the magnificence of nature. Some make good enough replications to elicit a Wow or admiration from their viewers and readers. But none can conjure the true experience of walking through and into a powerful experience of nature, robed in all her glory.

I certainly don’t have skills enough as a writer. As I walk the trail that threads into the thin slit of the Echidna gorge I play with metaphors. Like a snake slithering its way into or out of the giant rock. Like a crack that forms in the perfect cake you just pulled out of the oven as it cools. Like the little camera they stick up in you when you go in for a colonoscopy … hmmm. See what I mean? 

Yet there we were weaving our way into this thin canyon, walls towering 100 metres overhead, spread at the beginning by a few metres and by the end by only a mere metre, or less. Water gushes into this natural gash and softens its curves like an expert sculpture, painting it with hues of red, orange, white and black. The cave it creates is in shadows, darkens the deeper in you go, but look up and see a thin ribbon of blue reminding you of the day you left behind.

Near the end, the trail opens into an oval room with two simple benches and an interpretive sign that looks like a podium. I imagine a musician with her cello letting the walls of this great sanctuary play ball with her tunes. A quartet playing soft music while a poet stands at the podium, reading his artistic renditions of the grandeur of nature.

A narrow passageway leads into the final thin ribbon that ends at the tip of the gorge. This room is simple, grey, small. The nexus of nothingness where it all ends…and begins. We have the privilege to sit here for a time with no one else to break the silence.

We had planned to do two walks in the Bungle Bungle range today, this and the Mini Palms Gorge. But we’ve lingered so long in the Echidna Gorge that the afternoon is nearly spent. Instead we walk partway up the Homestead trail in that bewitching hour before the sun sets. The towering rock faces gradually absorb the sun's golden rays, saturating us with radiant colour so splendid it feels like the rock will burst like a too-ripe orange.

It has been a day of wonders at the Bungles.