While in Kununurra, we went on a tour around the agricultural area.  The guide turned out to be the brother-in-law of Peter and Jenni Jury!  The Ivanhoe crossing has been shut for the last couple of years as there was damage that has been too costly to repair.

We headed off from Kununurra and had a look around Wyndham before taking the Gibb River Road.  We left the van at the caravan park for this trip.  This was at The Grotto just south of Wyndham.  There were about 130 steps down into the gorge to see this.

We ended up stopping to help some Dutch tourists in a Britz 4wd with their second flat tyre of the day.  They were only about 10kms short of reaching the bitumen too!  Luckily for us and them, some other vehicles came along soon after who worked at El Questro station so they were able to help them.  Otherwise it would have meant us turning around and heading back, waiting around for tyres to be fixed and then dropping the guy back to their vehicle.  We decided to call in at Ellenbrae Station and stay there for the night.  This turned out to be a bad call!  There are plenty of stations along the Gibb that cater for tourists and this means that they are set up for campers with limited amenities but quite adequate all the same.  We spoke to the woman at the homestead, paid our money and went down to the camping area.  She was going to be down shortly to light the donkey heater for the hot water.  

On parking, I was going to head to the toilet but after walking a few paces and noticing that there was a bull behind a few trees, between me and the toilets, I decided to stop.  I watched him for a minute and decided that caution was a good idea and 'I didn't really need to pee just yet'!  As he started to walk away (I thought), I turned away and started to walk back to the truck.  Bun was watching and saw the bull wheel around 90 degrees and start to charge towards my back!!  He yelled out and I literally had about 2 seconds to register the noise, see Bun's freaked out face and think 'this is going to hurt'!  My legs must have turned to jelly, either that or a guardian angel gave me a shove haha.  I dropped to the ground and felt the snorting breath on the back of my neck and his hind leg gave me a glancing blow on my shoulder blade.  Bun said he was sure that I was going to cop the horns in my kidneys from the way he went for me!!  Soooo I ended up covered in dirt but without a scratch or bruise.....I really don't know how I escaped that one??  That bull sure had his cranky pants on though because he stopped about 20 metres away and turned to watch us, swishing his tail still.  The woman arrived a couple of minutes later and although I'm sure she thought I was over-reacting, once Bun told her that it had 'scared the f****ing shit out of him' she took us seriously.  She ended up having to chase him off in her vehicle because he really didn't want to move on.

We have laughed about it since, especially when telling the kids. I told Bun he would have to tell that story because the kids would just roll their eyes and think yeah Mum's over-dramatising again!  However we are both really thankful that I didn't end up in hospital or worse, especially when we talked to a ranger at Mitchell Falls a couple of days later and he told us that they had a woman gored in the National Park a couple of years ago!

Anyway that was probably enough excitement for us for the year!!

The Gibb River Rd wasn't really that rough we thought, especially compared to some of the other roads we've done in the last two years.  However once we turned off onto the Mitchell Falls road, it was another story!  That is seriously rough going....took about 3 hours to go 88kms!!  We walked to the Falls on the Sunday morning and had a swim at the top.  After talking LOTS of photos from lots of spots, we took the easy and scenic option of the helicopter flight back to the campground :)

Where's Wally?  Spot Bun in the photo above!

 On Sunday afternoon we decided that it would be a good idea to break up the trip back, so drove back out to the Kalumbaru rd and camped at King Edward River campground.  It was a full moon that weekend so Bun had been singing about "Kimberley Moon" so I set up the tripod to try to get a good shot.  Not so great but I'm still practicing.  At the campground at Mitchell Falls there was plenty of wildlife around during the night, including something we think may have been a sugarglider climbing up the ladder to the camper and hanging off the flyscreen!! Bun gave it a flick off, thinking it was a rat but decided later that it's tail was too thick to be a rat haha.

We travelled up to Kalumbaru on Monday morning and let me tell you, that WAS rough!  We looked around a bit and visited the museum at the mission before deciding to travel back down as far as Drysdale River Station and stay there for the night.  We were starting to run low on food by this point so thought that a hamburger would go down well for tea.  The standard burger there is $24 and the Kimberley burger (with extras) is $26!  They were tasty but we thought kind of overpriced.  I had paid for the night's accommodation at the shop but when I went to pay for the food as well there, the girl told me that she would fix it up at the bar later.  When Bun was buying drinks later, I thought he had paid for the tea.  The next morning when we were chatting, we suddenly realised that neither of us had paid!!  Each of us had thought that the other had paid LOL   Oh well, you get that sometimes :))

As we were nearly back towards El Questro there was a controlled burn happening, we were just happy that the road wasn't shut.

The Pentecost River crossing.

We did a tour from Kununurra that took us by bus to Lake Argyle, across the dam and then onto a boat for the cruise back along the river.  We would definitely recommend that tour to people.

Not our best look haha but you take what you can get sometimes!

This is a similar boat to the one we were on.

Before leaving Kununurra, we bought ourselves anniversary presents :))

We don't usually 'do' presents but thought that 30 years is a bit of a milestone!  Bun will now look classy for the weddings and I plan to visit the Jewellery Doctor when we get home, thinking I will get my engagement ring remodelled to include this and maybe some stones from my other jewellery?

After crossing into NT, we loved the sign on here!

We got into Darwin on Monday and settled in at the caravan park.  Garry Penno came out to the park for tea and Bun asked him if he remembered what he had been doing that night 30 years before....he was MC at our wedding reception!  It is so lovely to catch up with friends and it's like you talked to them last month, not years before.

Tuesday morning we went into the waterfront area early so that we could walk around a bit before it got too hot.....I checked the weather and at 8am, it said 30deg and 83% humidity!!! What the hell??

We had been trying to decide what we were going to do about work because we had scored jobs for both of us at a mango farm just outside Humpty Doo.  However that was going to last for at least 8 weeks and Bun said that he wasn't sure that I would cope with the heat and humidity.  Garry is the Farm Manager for Paspaley Pearls and offered us a couple of weeks work, cleaning, gardening and some cooking at one of their properties at Bynoe Harbour.  We had also applied for work with Viterra back in SA for the grain harvest but hadn't heard back.

We ended up ditching the mango farm for the caretaking job for Garry and thought that we would just wing it after that.  As it turned out, we got called by Viterra yesterday (Friday) and fingers crossed, will get a call to have medicals up here and then be offered jobs.  It is likely to be at Lock or Wudinna and we would be working 6 days a week, possibly starting in about 4 weeks.  That would bring us closer to home and probably finishing just in time to be home for Christmas!

We will head out to Bynoe tomorrow with Garry and stay there for the next couple of weeks with maybe one trip back into Darwin for stores, depending on how things go.  

We didn't even look at the price of this but it would be fun on the bike track!

Thank goodness for shady gardens in Darwin and the glorious colours of the flowers.

I thought it would be nice to have a photo from our anniversary but Bun was worried about his wrinkles so he tried to get rid of them LOL!

Not bad to still be laughing together after 30 years!!

Well that took a while to do this update but now that's done, we are about to head off to Garry's to watch Port play and have a BBQ....tough job but someone's got to do it :))

Cheers for now

Anne

I suddenly remembered the other day that there were some photos from Myroodah that I had missed putting up.  One of the days that I was having a rest/sleep, Bun took the camera when he went out to the yards to pick up the boss.  He was busy watching the mustering!

There was a fair bit of smoke around this night.

We went out to Luiluigui where the old homestead has been abandoned.

Check out the size of this boab!!

As we walked down the main (only) street in Halls Creek we spotted this sign, needless to say we didn't buy any meat LOL

We had a couple of free camps along the way to the Bungles, one of them at Larrawa Nature Stay.  The owner there said that we were welcome to come back any time for some work, as she said it's really hard to get people who are happy to be out in the middle of nowhere.

We stayed three nights at the free roadside stop near the turnoff for the Bungles.  We took two days to do some walks and the helicopter tour as it was pretty warm and I didn't want to wear out haha.

Kate will be happy to see that Bun still likes to 'fly' down hills :)

This was taken in Echidna Chasm!

Bun looking like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark?

And Cathedral Gorge!

On our second day in, we picked up a French backpacker.  He had left his 2wd at the rest stop and was going to walk in!  I think he was really pleased to get a ride when he saw what the road was really like, the maps don't give you a clue LOL

We ended up decided that the long hours of cooking at Myroodah were going to be worth it and we took a 45minute helicopter flight.....it was AWESOME!!  You just can't the full scale of it from the ground.

Probably way too many photos on here but this is only a fraction of what I took haha

We are now in Kununurra and after doing the whole cleaning, washing and shopping thing today, we are going to head off tomorrow to Wyndham and then on to Mitchell Falls.  We are leaving the van and motorbike here at the caravan park and going to use the rooftop camper.  We have sent out some emails about jobs and we will see what happens after we get back here.  It's about 36 degrees each day but thankfully the nights are really mild, I know people at home probably don't want to hear about weather LOL

Enough for now

Cheers

Anne