Day 59 - The Gibb River Road - Manning Gorge Campground to Silent Grove

 (Kate)

Day 59 – Gibb River Road: Manning Gorge Campground to Silent Grove

We did an awesome job packing up this morning, despite Keith and Nicole both being in pain from sunburn, and Kate being anxious about moving on to an unknown place. We got to Mt Barnett Roadhouse at 8:45am, just before the morning rush. We stocked up for 2 days with essentials, and will do a big shop when we get to Derby.

We headed west along the Gibb, and stopped for a swim at Galvan’s Gorge. It had an easy 1km walk to the waterhole, which was a decent size, and also had a rope swing and ledges to jump off, and a waterfall to swim under, although we checked it out very carefully for danger noodles this time. Ben spotted one a bit later and Nicole and some others at the waterhole checked it out.

Onwards. Thanks to all the corrugations, Friendy, the Minecraft cow, keeps falling off the handle, so she has been relocated to the dashboard next to the mobile phone holder. Endy the Enderman has also fallen sideways, but thanks to his long limbs, he just looks like he’s relaxing while lying down on his side. Very cute.

From recommendations from other travellers, we chose to camp at Silent Grove (Dulundi) which had an old fashioned "put cash in an envelope and put it in the box" arrangement. The maths challenged us all a bit, and Nicole ended up making the calculation. The road into Dulundi has just been graded so it was pretty good. There were 3 creek crossings, the deepest reaching the side steps. We collected wood before we went in there because it’s in a national park. There is a ranger on site which was handy. We found a nice site in the “generator area’ down the back, near one of the concrete circle fire pits. It is hot and dusty here and there are persistent march flies. Annoying. On the upside, reviews on Wikicamps said the generator area had good spots, and people were generally pretty good about turning them off at 7pm or whenever the designated time was. Also it was spacious, and the sun disappeared behind the local hill at about 4:30pm which cooled things down quite a bit. The ranger dropped around to check on us, and gave us advice about the walk into Bell Gorge (Dalmanyi) which we plan to do tomorrow. He also asked us to make our fire as small as possible and to extinguish it with water before we go to bed. Apparently there is currently a bushfire burning near Broome. The anthills here are really interesting. They look like they have been renovated in stages.

Nicole and Keith made Tuscan chicken strips, rice and frozen veg for dinner. And we had a comfort fire. A small one. This big pieces of wood we collected turned out to be not that great (full of termite dirt) but the smaller ones burned well. We star-gazed. The moon was again orange and full.

Tree roots finding their way around rocks