As I said in my last post, I relaxed around the Mitchell Falls Wilderness Lodge whilst my travel companions went off to see the Mitchell Falls. My first three photos below show more of the creek running through the site. I found the plant life under the clear running water really fascinating.
When we left there we rejoined the unmade Gibb River Road. We saw the Pentecost and Durack Rivers and a small amount of flooding across the road along the way as we headed to the famous resort known as the El Questro Wilderness Park. In the distance we could see the spectacular escarpments that featured so much in the film ‘Australia’, which I have mentioned before.
Every now and then we saw debris many metres up in the trees. That is the height the floods can reach in the Wet Season. This is why the roads cannot be made here. Instead they are smoothed out by graders in the Dry Season.
El Questro is sought out by the rich and famous, so has some better roads leading into it and even a small airport near by. It offers luxurious accommodation as well as the more humble accommodation we enjoyed - more tented cabins, but very nice ones. We could have paid extra and left the group to stay in the more luxurious quarters, but none of us chose to do that, as far as I am aware, not even the gentleman who was a former Australian Ambassador and a fascinating conversationalist.
By now we were becoming quite a close-knit group, having spent so much time in the outback together for such long hours each day - departing about 7 am or 8 am each day and get finally getting to our cabins to rest at about 8 pm each night. I think that is the beauty of travelling in a small group (there were just 18 or 19 of us) and having such a wonderful tour guide/ director who had everyone involved.
We all took turns to sit up the front of the truck with Chappy. What a view from his cabin! What a climb to get into it! And when we weren't in the front with him, as I have said before, he had us moving around so we took turns to be in the absolutely bone-shaking back seats. (The other seats were bad enough!)
The next day, after a good night’s sleep, we had some great excursions. We stayed at this site for two nights. It was just terrific, and a bit of a change from the smaller Wilderness Lodges, which of course could not offer as many facilities or as big a range of food. In fact we learned that because of flooding, some of these are entirely packed up after the Dry Season. They cannot operate in the Wet Season!
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| Looking up into one of the trees at the lodge. |
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| Fascinating aquatic life in the creek running through the wilderness lodge. |
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| Some water along the road. Our tall bus-truck had no trouble driving through this. |
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| Our vehicle! |
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| One of the rivers along our route. |
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| The magnificent escarpment rising up from the plain. Unfortunately we did not have time to drive up close at this point. |
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| It was lovely to see some of these bright yellow flowers. I think we were told they were flax. |
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| This river is full in the Wet Season, but it was quite dried out at the time we crossed over it. |
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| These wonderful rich red colours are of course due to all the iron compounds in the soils and rocks. |
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