It is our 24^th wedding anniversary today.  We drove the additional 11km into Bell Gorge from the Silent Grove camp ground.   The walk from the car park to the gorge was along a creek bed to start with, not too hard, then once at the gorge to get down to the large pool below the waterfall the track turned into a test track for mountain goats, it was very steep, very rocky & slippery.  The rocks lower down had been worn so smooth by years & years of raging flood waters in the wet season.  Bell Gorge is spectacularly beautiful, with the waterfall dropping over four ledges around 20 metres into a large pool.  We had a wonderful swim, the water was so nice & crystal clear, we swam under the waterfall & got pounded by the falling water, it was warm & hard to stay under the waterfall as the current kept pushing us away from the cliff face.  We stayed in for ages, got out & sunned ourselves, then had another long swim. A tour group arrived & we shared the pool with them.  There were a few more waterfalls further down, Tereza & I swam to but we didn’t get as far as the next big fall about 200m further on.  All the rock climbing & swimming made us hungry so we ate our lunch on the rocks next to the pool alongside the tour group.  We had a bit of a chat to a few of them, the usual –  where they had been & where they going to.  The walk out of Bell Gorge was very hot, 38C & the sweat was rolling off us by the time we got back to the car park.  The drive back to Silent Grove was very pleasant in the air-conditioned car.  We spent the afternoon reading, Sue & John had a sleep in the heat.  We rubbed some aloe-vera into our sunburn, we had spent too much time having a good swim.  I think Bell Gorge is one of the nicest gorges we have been to in the Kimberley region.  A couple of corellas have a nest in a hollow in the tree near our camp site, they entertained us for a while.  We also saw some absolutely beautiful variegated wrens on our walk, the colours in these birds are amazing.

I took a bit of time to replace some screws in the microwave that had shaken loose on the trip & used some Loctite to hopefully keep them in place.  Dinner tonight, for a change, was cooked by me, BBQ steak & onions with boiled potatoes in the jacket, with Tereza doing all the preparation & the salad.  The red was a nice Taylors merlot.  John broke open a lovely ginger dark chocolate to make the anniversary dinner more special.

We see a lot of young German, French & some Spanish & even a few Danish, Swedish, Italians & English but we have never come across any Americans.  I can’t help remembering our famous tourism advertisement in bad taste. They must have missed it in America or (not surprisingly) didn’t do the trick to entice them to come down under.