Departed Kooljaman early as Anne had a massage appointment at 11 in BROOME , which allowed us to refill the gas bottle, replenish the pantry and have a delightful sausage roll and coffee from the Shady Lane café which I would highly recommend and I was also able to setup a Support case with Apple re the IPad . We arrived at Derby around 4pm and the Caravan Park had looked after us by giving us two sites for the price of one which allowed us to stay hitched to the car overnight allowing for a quick get away in the morning. After setting up the rest went for a short walk to the Derby wharf which turned out to be over 7 kilometres in length, while I had a forty five minute conversation with Apple.
Visited the worlds longest water trough and the Boab prison tree as we left Derby for Windjana Gorge where we selected (on advice from other travellers) to stay in the generator section because very few people have generators while the quiet section is packed and noisy – will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Windjana Gorge itself has three main walks – all along the creek bed taking you up and into the gorge, allowing you to see savanna grasslands at the entrance with large termite mounds which are very different in appearance to what you see in The top end and centre of the NT.
Inside there are steep dolerite cliffs, large numbers of fresh water crocodiles ( how they all survive the dry season is beyond me).
In the photo above you can see that the water is already stagnant, and the freshies are gathering on the sand bank to sun bake.
We drove to Tunnel Creek a further 35 kms along the road. Tunnel Creek is famous for being the hide out of Jandamurra the Indigenous resistance leader in this area in the 1890's. Not suprisingly it was extremely well hidden and cuts underneath the Napier ranges for just over one kilometre. In this case the photos speak for themselves
looking back to the entrance
a small section of the roof collapsed a few years ago
looking to the exit
Indigenous rock art along the creek bed