Life Interlude

I haven't finished the saga of the GRR, but I have been alerted (by M&D) that I have had other "blog-worthy" adventures since returning that really deserve a post. This is that post!

First one was going for a one-night camping trip with Chiara and Corinne down to Bullara Station, just an hour south of Exmouth. We went last Thursday just to get out of town and sleep under the stars, but man was it chilly and windy! Thank goodness there were some campfires scattered about that we could bask in, but mostly it was just a great chance to sit around and shoot the shit. I didn't take any photos, but the station is known for their delicious scones, so I was pumped to have a warm baked scone for breaky before heading back to town for a busy Friday night. Realistically, the scones are just vessels for the cream and jam anyway. Perfect. 

Mulla Mulla wildflowers and a termite mound on the drive back from Bullara

Gaia's birthday was on September 13th, two weeks to the day after mine, and we spent the whole day hanging out with friends and diving. First up was breakfast at the beach shack with a big group, then Rhys, her boyfriend, took Gaia and me out for a day of scuba diving! It was so beautiful. The wind cooperated, we got to swim in a giant bait ball (a school of little bait fish that attract bigger predatory fish like tuna and trevally and the like), and because we weren't out on a commercial boat (like when we get to go for fun dive days at work), we didn't have time limits! So two, hour+ dives in a row. And then after diving we spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beers and fishing, watched the sunset, and tried not to laugh so hard we fell off the boat. It starts to sound repetitive in this blog, I guess, but it was a perfect day. 

Ready for action

Rhys

Gulf sunsets

This past Sunday I worked on the boats on what was billed as a humpback whale tour day.  The weather conditions were absolutely mint (gentle breeze, warm sun, very low swell) and the animals were cooperating, and I was working with an awesome crew of friends. We started the morning off with a snorkel with some sea turtles and reef sharks, and then when we headed outside the lagoon a pod of pilot whales swam along with the boat! They have these adorable smooshy faces and look like fat dolphins. Or maybe torpedos. So good. 

After the pilot whales, our spotter plane pilot found us some whale sharks! This late in the season that's awesome and by no means a guarantee. We spent most of the morning swimming with three different whale sharks that were SO SLOW. They just had no where to be and were in no rush to get there; it was amazing. Some days the sharks just don't want to play ball. They dive too deep for us to see them, they swim fast, they change direction suddenly and we can't keep up. But not on Sunday, y'all. 

Our last shark as she melted down into the water and slipped out of sight

Probably a boat strike caused the top of this one's tail to look like a chunk has been taken out. Predator strike would take out a different-shaped chunk. 

Beauty!

When we got to swim with whale sharks this late in the season I chalked it up as a win! But then when the skipper said the spotter plane had found a mama humpy and her calf I was stoked! Best news? Baby was more than 50% the size of mama, which means they were fair game to swim with if their behavior indicated we weren't distressing them! So that's how it happened that I got to watch a mama and baby humpy swim directly underneath me in the water. Ningaloo magic. 

Y'all, what a day. Since then I've been out snorkeling with Carly, to dinner with Stewie, and had some of the girls around for a dinner of wine and cheese. Kieran came through town on his drive from Perth back to Broome on a work trip, and I've been hanging out with co-workers a few nights this week who have had lots of fresh caught mahi mahi and tuna that they needed help eating. And in an hour or so, Corinne and I are going to head to the beach for some R&R before a hectic Friday night at work. 

It's funny how I go through these phases of super sociability and then other times I feel like an absolute recluse, but I guess it's just the spring-time air around town. Wildflowers, warm days, cool nights, and the joy of having an apartment to call home that I really love. An apartment which I've just negotiated a 2-year lease on! So holy cow, life is good.

A baby gecko I found at work

A huntsman spider that I rescued from my living room wall

Beach day with Carly

Kangaroo Paw that Kieran brought me (state flower of Western Australia!)

Feasting with the girls

A goanna Gaia and I watched hunting in the garden yesterday

"We are not completely normal" pt. 2

Our Monday morning roll out began with a trip to the visitor's center in Derby to get the latest road condition updates, a quick fuel up, and then a stop at the Gibb River Road road conditions sign for a "before" photo. 

With a boab in Derby

Kate, Gaia, and Tessie: Girls Trip!

If Broome is the Gateway to the Kimberley, Derby and the GRR are the heart of it. I mentioned in my last post that the Kimberley is home to lots of unique species of plants and animals, but the boab is probably my favorite of them. The above photo will not be the last giant, ancient tree that you'll have to look at, dear readers. But it was early in my love affair with the things. 

Boabs are only found in this part of Australia, not even extending much beyond the WA border with the Northern Territory. Their close cousins, the baobabs, are only found in some bits of mainland Africa and the island of Madagascar. Their name, boab, is actually a perversion of baobab (Australian linguistic laziness strikes again!). Anyway, these sometimes gorgeous, sometimes hideous, bulbous, ancient trees are scattered across the landscape, sometimes standing alone, or sometimes in copses with many trees of different ages. Don't worry, y'all: I have photos.

While we're on the subject of my tree obsession, another candidate: the kapok tree. They look like a child's drawing of a tree with bright yellow flowers... where the artist forgot to add leaves. They're basically just sticks in the ground with vibrant yellow flowers. Later in the trip we learned the flowers are actually edible and make a nice addition to salads!

Kapok flower, fallen from the tree

Anyway. Traveling. The first bits of the Gibb were, to our surprise, paved! I had assumed the whole track was just corrugated dirt, but most of the first day's drive was paved (NB: Aussies call paved roads bitumen. Americans call them asphalt. I do not, frankly, know if this is because of a difference in materials used. I just remember it took me a long time of living here to know what people were talking about when roads were discussed). Our first stop along the way was to Windjana Gorge campground. The Park Ranger was an absolute gem and he suggested we camp not in the "quiet camp" section, as we planned, but to head into the "generator use" section instead. Camp rules dictate that generators be turned off by 8pm anyway, but the thought of generator noise scares people off so that the quiet camp area ends up being really crowded a lot of the time! It was amazing advice that we followed for the trip's duration and it never failed. Way more elbow room, still quiet: amazing. 

So we got settled into our campsite and headed straight out for a hike into the gorge before sunset. 

Mildly alarming start to a hike

Oceane entering the gorge trailhead

My first freshwater croc

Windjana Gorge from Sunset Beach

Windjana is such a spectacular start to the Gibb. Beautiful, rust-colored cliffs; cool critters (we saw rock wallabies while we were hiking but I'm too slow with the camera... lazy, floating crocs are more my speed); and your campsite is right there. It was magic. It was also the first place we saw notices about cane toads on the journey.

Right at the trailhead we saw a "cane toad disposal" box. They're a poisonous invasive species without any natural predators here, and they spread fast. One biologist we met on the road told me that a female cane toad can lay 30,000 eggs twice per year! So they're a real issue. 

We didn't see any in the afternoon, but when Andrew went to the toilet later in the evening, there was one inside. So he, good citizen that he is, took it upon himself to remove the toad and carry it to the disposal box about 500m away. But he didn't have a bag or gloves or any kind of protective gear (remember, they're poisonous), so he improvised:

They're ugly little buggers

Andrew with toad chopsticks

Bagged us a toad

Obviously, Mia and Gaia and I thought this was phenomenal. We grabbed a rubbish bag to put the thing in (500m is a long walk in the dark with a squirming toad!), and kept Andrew company on his walk to the disposal box. High on our success as citizen scientists, we decided to look around all of the bush loos we passed on the way back to camp to see if we could nab some more toads. Which is how we encountered these cool little critters:

a VERY LARGE spider that was too scary to put my hand near for a size comparison

stick bug

a nervous little echidna

Talk about a little National Geographic walk! Some Aussies we passed on the walk back to camp laughed at us for bringing the toad to the disposal box and mentioned that they'd lend us a shovel for offing the next one we found... which was about 3 minutes later. We weren't prepared for the barbarism of shoveling toads, vegetarians (Mia and Andrew) and animal lovers (all of us) that we are, so we, laughing our heads off, escorted another toad to the box. We stopped looking for toads at that point and headed to bed, content with the day's activity.

Next morning we were up and out to check out another National Park nearby, Tunnel Creek. It's a whole network of caves in the hills, with a beautiful little creek that cuts right through the whole thing. The hike/swim takes you through the main cave, but there were lots of little offshoots with bats squeaking about. 

Gaia at the cave's exit mouth

Jess and Gaia in the cave

Mia with an underground waterfall!

At one point, the only way to proceed is to swim across a little stretch of the creek, and at a few others, you have to walk through water up to waist deep to make it through. All of which would be a non-issue except for the crocodiles!

The crocs at Tunnel Creek are all meant to be freshies, so 80% of their diet is insects. The remaining 20% is small amphibians, reptiles, and fish. At this point in our journey, however, we were not yet privy to this knowledge of their dietary habits. As far as I was concerned, all I could see was teeth! So when Jess and I fell behind the group and had to do a waist-deep walk across the creek with a croc floating directly in the ONLY route, we were a little... apprehensive. We both had head lamps on, so we just kept them sighted on the critter the whole time and hoped that everything we'd heard about freshies not being aggressive was true. When we walked into the water, she submerged and thank GOODNESS our torches were bright enough to keep her in our sights... we were nervous! But she just scooted out of our way and let us proceed. 

Jess

Rock art on the wall outside Tunnel Creek

We headed back to the campground in time for another sunset and happy hour in Windjana Gorge.

What a view!

A bower bird nest in Windjana Gorge

While Gaia was making a super yummy stir fry noodle dinner for us, a cheeky, shabby looking kangaroo was investigating our campsite. 

stir fry by campfire

Skippy

Next morning we had a pretty short drive day but wanted to fit in visits to two different gorges. First up was Lennard Gorge, which was a hike along a pretty little creek that ended with a gorgeous view of a waterfall. Or it was supposed to end with the view. Because Gaia and I are Gaia and I, the hike instead ended only after we'd clambered down the rocky, nature-made steps to the waterfall pool and swum in it. 

With a kapok tree... see how it's just flowers on stick branches?

View from the bottom

Gaia en route on the "off-road" path

It was such a beautiful walk and an even more beautiful waterfall at the end of it and we had it all to ourselves! The water was fresh and cool, the sun was shining, and the company couldn't be beat. Magic.

Bell Gorge, the next stop of the day, took us down a little hike through some denser tree cover along another creek. The view opens out at the end of the trail to a huge rock flat where the creek combines with another. The two combined creeks tumble along to a beautiful waterfall, but if you hike across the creek to the far side of the rock flat, up a big hill, and then climb down into the gorge, you can swim in it! So duh, that's what we did. 

Oceane and Gaia at the bottom of the falls

Bell Gorge falls from the top

We spent the afternoon swimming around in the falls, exploring deeper into the gorge, and then finally decided we should start the trek out before it got properly dark. We still had to set up camp in Silent Grove, so we got moving.

The camp site was situated between boab and eucalyptus trees which promised a raucous morning of cockatoo commotion, but it was pretty cool to feel so very much in Australia with a simple look at my surrounding plant life. Sometimes I kinda forget, you know? And then a flock of cockatoos will fly overhead and I think "damn, I'm living in a place where these are the natives!" and just feel so very lucky. 

Silent Grove campground

Thursday morning we had a long drive to get to our next campground so we did our best to get up and out early. We had to drive to Mornington Station, a privately held former cattle station that is now a massive hub of environmental sustainability research in the Kimberley. The station is now dedicated to raising funds for the Australian Wildlife Conservancy through camping, tours, and research undertaken right on the property. It's also a remarkably pretty stretch of drive to get there!

Jess' car doing one of the creek crossings to get to Mornington

Kapok

Boab

There are still lots of gates to keep the cattle from roaming

We got settled into a campsite and then decided to go for a little roam about the property by heading into Bluebush, a little stretch of shady freshwater where we could spend the afternoon hours lazing in the sun and swimming. We whiled the day away, soaking up the serenity, and then watched the sunset from atop Tessie on the way back to camp. Day 1 in Mornington Wilderness Camp was a success!

Andrew in Bluebush

Oceane and Gaia

Next morning our plan was to go soak up some time in Dimond Gorge. I woke up quite early, quite by accident, so I woke Gaia up and talked her into going for a dawn hike to watch the sun rise over the ranges. She doesn't like to miss out on adventures for silly things like sleep anyway, and let me tell you. It was so. Worth. It.

We got back to camp right around the time that everyone else was rolling out of bed, so we still got to have leisurely breakfast before heading out to Dimond Gorge!

It's possible to hire out canoes from the camp that are set up and ready to go at the waterside once you've driven the 20km or so from camp to the gorge itself. The distance is misleading, though, because it took nearly an hour and a half to traverse those k's. We hired one canoe for three people and broke up into two groups to go out. Lots of fun, terrible canoe skills (at least in my boat with Gaia and Oceane), and a chance to take cat naps in the sun while waiting for the others. The adventure portion of the day's plan didn't begin til we were trying to leave, though. 

There used to be a law on the books in Western Australia that all cars need to have little devices called immobilizers installed. They're little computer chips that prevent the engine from starting if the chip isn't in close enough proximity to the ignition when the key is turned. It's meant to be a security feature. All of that sets the scene nicely, I think, for the fiasco that happened as we tried to leave Dimond Gorge. 

Jess, you see, doesn't have a spare car key. So when her key broke as she turned it in the ignition to leave the gorge about 30 mins before sunset, we thought we could be in some trouble. Not to worry, though: Jess hopped out, grabbed a pair of pliers from her toolkit in the back and used those to turn the key. The engine kept turning over and over but just wouldn't kick on. Which is when we remembered the immobilizer. It must've fallen out of the key when it broke. So all 6 of us were crawling around on hands and knees, in a dusty prickle patch where the car was parked, looking for a tiny electronic chip about half the size of my pinky fingernail. With 30 mins to sunset. 20kms from a wilderness camp situated 90kms from the turnoff onto one of the most rugged dirt roads in Australia, and another 250kms from that turnoff to the nearest town with an auto electrician who could program a new immobilizer. When Mia spotted it after 15 minutes of desperate searching, we tried to stay calm. When Jess, hands shaking, managed to get the key back together enough to turn it in the ignition, we all held our breath. When the car roared to life, tears were shed. What a SNAFU!

By the time we drove back to camp and showered, we couldn't manage to cook anything more than instant noodles for dinner. But man oh man did they ever taste good! A biologist working at the sanctuary did an evening presentation on the kinds of environmental controls they're putting in place to help with invasive species that have decimated native wildlife (like feral cats and cows, cane toads, and others), which was fascinating, but all of us headed to bed straight after. It was a long day.