Before setting out I decided to photograph the dust that came into our “King of the Road” even though it has good seals it was just inevitable where the poor thing has been dragged through.  The outside & the car certainly look the part of an outback wilderness adventure.

The sun was up as we started the day threading our way carefully back out of the Barnett River Gorge track & back onto the Gibb River Road, which is now more of a pleasure to drive on as the road surface has improved considerably, still some bad parts, far outweighed by the good.  Our first stop was at Barnett River Roadhouse, just at the end of 26km of road works that was very nice to drive on.  John & Sue picked up a few groceries & took advantage of the Telstra phone to arrange for replacement shock absorbers to be sent to Broome.  Our next stop was Galvan’s Gorge, a parking area at the side of the road & a nice 1km walk into an absolutely beautiful waterhole with a small waterfall trickling into it, plus, as an added bonus, some Wandjina art that you can see while swimming.  We were very fortunate in having the waterhole all to ourselves & the water was so nice to swim in, with inquisitive small fish with no fear of us.  We met some French backpackers on the way out & they told us that our planned next stop, Adcock Gorge, was not worth going to as the road in was very rough (we are over bad roads) & the waterhole was stagnant with a green scum on the surface.

We soldiered on, admiring the landscape as the Phillips Range then the Leopold Range started to dominate the landscape.  These ranges are very pretty with the colour of the cliff faces & rising straight up out of the flat Kimberley Plains.  Imintji store was our next stop where we had fresh kangaroo pie for lunch washed down by a nice Bundaberg Ginger Beer.  This store was amazing, it had all of the necessities, plus a workshop out the back with a myriad of used tyres adorning the fences – it clearly indicates how many tyres get blown on this road.

We decided to skip Mornington Wilderness Camp (very reluctantly because this was a place we all really wanted to see) as it was a long way in, then back out over some very rough road almost 200 km & too much of a challenge for John’s broken shock absorber.  Instead, we decided to visit Silent Grove & Bell Gorge, so drove the 19km into Silent Grove on a good dirt road & set up camp under a few shady trees.  There are flushing toilets, hot showers (heated by solar panels) & a working Telstra public phone this far out in the bush, it is a real luxury.  The camp ranger even put on a display & caught by hand a King Brown snake that was in the tour operator amenities block, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world.  He was very competent & caught it surprisingly quickly by the tail & dropped it into a bag.  We kidded with him that it was a tame snake that he used to impress tour groups.  He released the snake a few kilometres away at Bell Creek. We camped in the generator area & charged our batteries for a few hours whilst preparing & eating dinner.  Again the full moon is wonderfully bright & thankfully a breeze has sprung up that will hopefully cool things down a bit, it was 36C today.  The locals say that the hot season is about a week early.

John cooked another great meal, braised lamb shank in garlic & herb with Tereza doing a great job with the vegies, all washed down with a lovely sparkling red.