Day 47 - Bungles & Tanami Highway

Thursday, 15 July 2021

We’re glad we came to the Bungles. So glad that we decide to get up at dawn and do a last trek before we leave.

At 5:30am, surprisingly, other campers are stirring. We’re often the first ones up at camp. But when we arrive at the trailhead at 6:10am, the carpark is empty. We walk the first kilometre of the trail that winds under the escarpment just as the sun is peaking over the northern tip of the range. Lyrical birdsong is our only companion. It is splendid to be up at this hour, alone on the trail.

Mini Palms Gorge is wider than Echidna Gorge, full of magnificent tumbled balls of conglomerate rock, once a river bed that carried the stones out of the Kimberley Range (350 million years ago). Now they look like giant jewels resting along the path. The trail weaves around and between them, some so close you have to suck in to squeeze through. It helps to be a small person. 

In the centre of the gorge is a grand oval canyon, ruddy rock walls extending high overhead and a ceiling of blue sky. An impressive construction of steel ladders takes you to a platform overlooking the v-shaped end of the gorge, a flat sandy garden of Livingstone Palms, wild grasses and ferns lining the walls. We are the first visitors for the day and enjoy 20 minutes of rapt silence in this tranquil setting.

 

Drunk on its beauty, it’s time to leave the Bungles. The road out seems more course and irritating than the way in. Perhaps we’ve been sensitized, or maybe we’re just sore that we have to leave, back through a landscape where cows have ravaged and ruined the land, which looks dark and miserable compared to the paradise of the Bungles. After a two-hour drive, our nerves are rankled, moods grumpy, relations snappy.

The silky smooth ride on the bitumen highway helps calm our moods. By the time we get to Halls Creek, an unappealing one-street town lined with caravans and camper trailers alongside the ever-present lulling black pedestrians, we’re feeling better. Good enough to make a right turn just past the town onto yet another gravel road, back into the desert.