Broome – Chris Collins

Gift of the Gibb – Part II

The joy of the Kimberley is wilderness. That is why people go. Our little troop, loud on port and gin often disturbed the peace and quiet so I didn’t get my bird-geek on, but trees and flowers are not frightened of general carousing. Boabs were a wonderful discovery. I’ve seen images of these, often in paintings, or they are described in poems and stories where someone is sat in their shade, but despite their hype as the truly iconic Proper Australian Tree, they are …pretty ugly. Or so I thought. They are wide and squat in the trunk and often depicted with dead looking branches bare of leaves spread like a crucifix under a punishing sun on the dry, dry, endless red earth. Give me the moist green of a jarrah, or the whimsical fronds of yellow box gums. Not this blasted, bleak thing.

I have been converted. We arrived in Broome at the very start of our trip on a warm night, fragrant with frangipani blossoms (which I thought only existed in Marquez novels), overjoyed to be released from the grip of a Canberra winter into the purple open palm of the Indian ocean and its scented breezes. The first boab I saw was thickset of trunk, curved like an old woman – like an apple, and abundant with leaf. Like a green plume, ornamented with huge, creamy white blossoms frothing with a thousand long stamens. It was beautiful. I have never seen such a friendly looking tree; and friendly they are, being filled with water in the desert. At El Questro, someone has helpfully installed a tap in the trunk of one such tree and the water was pure and clear, and a lot tastier than what came out the tank of our bus. I want you to imagine Terry Pratchett’s Nanny Ogg-made-tree, opening her arms out to hug her children because that is what their wide, wizened, warm and friendly trunks remind me of. The boab nuts which endure long after the leaves (and apparently should NOT be eaten before some serious preparation) hang like Christmas baubles and gifts, reachable between the cleared branches.

As well as the landscape of pink wildflowers, yellow cotton flower and embracing boabs, there is a universe of stars. One of my favourite bits of the trip was going to bed. We have, at last, joined the ranks of Aussies who rave about ‘swags.’ This word is so ingrained in the Australian dialect that they don’t even think to modify it to people like me who think they’re talking about an elaborate curtain arrangement. I have been initiated into the mystery: it is a heavy-duty canvas sleeping bag, for your sleeping bag. There ya go, that’s it. You unroll it, it has a sort of sewn-in foam mattress layer which is comfier than any amount of money spent on blow up/pack down camp mats, you put your sleeping bag inside it, then fight your way through two sets of zips to get in. Exciting for early morning wee urges, useless against mosquitos, hardly lightweight portable, but, you know, if you want to get romantic about it, we could call it a star mat. Because that’s what it’s best for, snuggling in comfortably and watching the universe. On our first night the sky was lit an unreal purple, with the clouds and studs of the milky way tangled up between the branches of a boab glowing silver by the sky. One night after returning from the loo, I watched stars shoot in slow motion; one for up to 8 continuous seconds. What a beautiful way to fall asleep. Another night, I heard dingoes howling. This is less comfortable. I remind you that I am just lying on the ground, face exposed to the nocturnal exploits of wildlife with no walls to divert attraction. What if a dingo nibbles my toes? What if a snake slithers over me? Sleeping on the ground in swags was another thing we would not have done if we had not been with Daddy Damo, and of course, snakes try to avoid big, vibrating things like us.

All this came to a head one night when I saw a croc in the campsite.

Our little camp spot on the well-ordered, well amenitied, boozed up El Questro campsite was right by the river. This is the Pentecost River that Definitely Has Crocs, and after some very scientific finger measuring on the map, the campsite’s location on the river is far less than that all important 100km away from the sea. We unrolled our swags beneath a tree a mere five Yates-Paces (YPs) from the bank itself. I’m sure it’s fine, I said, if they had a pitch where people kept disappearing, we’d know about it. There was a swimming part of the river, with a sort of wall built into it with rocks to protect children from crocs. I refer you above to the bit about crocs crawling up waterfalls and you sure as hell wouldn’t have got me in there. But they’re ambush predators. They don’t sneak out of the water to drag campers off. I’m sure it’s fine. Sure. I slept with memories of brolgas flying into the sunset, the starlight. Then I came back from me midnight wee.

Two little red dots were staring at me from the middle of our camp stool circle.

We’d had a tour of a crocodile sanctuary in Broome and the chap had told us; if you’re camping and you get up for a piss and see little red dots glowing in the dark, those’re freshies. Don’t panic too much, it means the river’s good, you’ll have good fishing, but if they all disappear one night and are replaced by two yellow dots, then get the hell out. Still. Two little red dots more than I wanted to see. Perfect, glowing red dots, and nothing between me and them. I woke up the Gentleman. Dude, get ready to run. We stared in horror together and he stood up for a better look. Three, glowing red dots.

Our campfire was a metal barrel with regular holes drilled in the side along the bottom for air. It was still glowing. Panic over.

Purnululu sounds like a song, doesn’t it? What a lovely word. This was our most remote spot, the campsite was a shed toilet and a tap, defo snakes everywhere I’m sure of it, and the home of unique, layered sandstone beehive shaped rocks. Those that have been to Kata Tjuta’s many heads – it was much like that, you walked through a city of rocks cutting their blades on the blue sky, but they were red and black striped. I wonder if you could learn every rock, every tower, every shape. It was beautiful. These skyscrapers of stone bubble up from the plain in a group, surrounded by smooth, flat land filled with termite mounds and melaleuca. We did some beautiful hikes across the empty Picaninny creek to the look out, then through a maze of flowers to Cathedral gorge and Echidna chasm. Cathedral gorge is the end of a creek where during the wet season a waterfall spills over the top to join the creek and has cut out this huge open cave with pretty amazing acoustics. Greg sang Meatloaf. I sang The Cruel Mother. I don’t know why I chose a sad song. Aren’t the rocks sad? They have watched for so long. Echidna chasm is a thin gap between two walls of red stone, cool and shady, with that same Uluru red AF and blue AF contrasts and finches flitting between the cracks and trees. I write lots of reports commending people who have ‘strategic overview’ who can ‘see the bigger picture.’ We got an expensive 18-minute helicopter ride to see the ‘bigger picture,’ but the lasting joy comes from the close-up details; tufts of tiny white and maroon dry flowers, the stamens of blue petals, the different shades of crimson.

Lake Argyle was the last main stop. Science: this a man-made lake. Insert other info here, about failed agricultural intentions or whatever. For us, this was yet another stretch of water we got in, then out of and then saw crocodiles. Fuck sake. We jumped in the water, we saw freshies up real close; little, short-eared rock wallabies with their joeys on the stones above us and we lazed in the water as the sun went down. Aussies have a cute thing where they chuck a ladder over the side of a boat and lazily announce, pool’s open! I like that. But I really liked being on a boat full of adults shouting, ‘Yeeesss, that one spat at me!!’ There were little archer fish in the water which have great eyesight and will spot crumbs of bread if you hold them out. They use this superpower to spot flies hovering above the water’s meniscus and spit water at them like a missile to bring them down for eating. They’ll do this to bread holding humans, too.

Our final day was in Katherine Gorge, Nitmiluk park’s thousands of bats and Edith falls for one last gorge dunk. This was every bit as lovely as any other gorge, but it was now melancholy with the thought of leaving, of saying goodbye to new friends and sadly recognising that you will not laugh at another of Graham’s puns, or hear another of Greg’s songs, or see another unique pair of boardies from Ben’s inexhaustible wardrobe.

The wonder of travel sometimes, is when it’s over. I’m not sure I really believe this, but I do believe that the important part is reflection and that needs time and sometimes, distance. What images distilled in your mind? What now will be the thing that will pierce you with the briars of nostalgia? It’s the bird geek in me talking, but every day we were chased by the fluted hammer-on call of a bird which now holds in its round notes the heat and smells and yellow flowers of the Kimberley. I was overjoyed when I finally tracked it down in Darwin’s beautiful botanic gardens; a blissful twenty minutes of standing still, listening, looking, moving slowly, and spotting it at last up in the fork of an unromantically spikey tree. I could see its little throat move so I knew that was definitely that ball of feathers making that sound and I could see enough to identify it as ‘something like a pigeon’ so I could start googling doves of the NT and finally call it by its blue-eyed name: peaceful dove. This is why travel is important. You learn about people and things you didn’t even know existed. Another fact I learned that I can’t seem to shake was from our boat guide telling us that Lake Argyle should rise by about 6m every year during the wet season. But repeated drought over the past 8 or so years have replenished it by a mere 30cm a year. Can you imagine that? SIX metres down to 30 centimetres for 8 years. Even this incredible wet season’s efforts of raising the water by an impressive 9m has not brought it back to pre-drought levels. Guide Damo told us that in his 7 years driving people up and down the Gibb River Road, he has never had to swim across Tunnel Creek, and he has no idea what all the wildflowers are called because he’s never seen them before. I hope he sees them again next year and our joy at them wasn’t luck. But increasing drought, and it is caused by increased burning of fossil fuels raising temperatures by over a degree (look, that’s the science, and confirmed by a real geo-paleo…super scientist we had on the tour with us), means those wildflowers might be luck, and those changes are stripping a lot of beauty and colour from the world. And going back to my little peaceful dove, what if they disappear too? This is another reason why travel is important. When you find something new and beautiful, like that blue-eyed, fluting bird, you want to protect it. You’re connected to it, you named it, or held it or touched it, left a bit of yourself with it.

Allowing its death is to permit the death of a bit of you.

Gift of the Gibb – Pt 1

‘So this is it, guys! Jump in.’

In, he said. Well, I didn’t quite know what ‘in’ was. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was cold and needed a wee. I was aware that there was water of an uncertain depth ahead and while I’d like to use the old metaphor of ‘inky black;’ maybe chuck in a ‘gurgling’ to describe it, I’d be lying because I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The light of my feeble headtorch patchily revealed that the valiant Damo – our guide, had stripped down to his shorts and boots and was rubbing his hands together between hunched shoulders. Then that image was gone pretty quick, lost to the gulping blackness. Apart from the wobbling, unenthusiastic glow of his headtorch ebbing away, I could see nothing else.

I stood on the sand, with the Gentleman nudging me; go on, Chris. But why the fuck, I thought, am I in a pitch-dark cave at 6am about to swim in a flood-swollen, frozen creek infested with goddamn crocodiles?

Well, I didn’t want to be left in the dark on me own for a croc to find, so in you go, – and I did that thing I do when getting in water (only recently discovered, as entering the inclement waters of the Irish, Atlantic and North Seas is not something in which sensible Brits indulge), which, it turns out, is hyperventilate the words ‘shit! fuck! fuck! Ok, I’m in, I’m in, shit! fuck’ and there you are, aloft, kick, swim! Hope your boots don’t weight you down, don’t think about the crocs and get to the other side.

This was the first major spot on our tour of the Kimberley; heading from Broome to Darwin: Tunnel Creek. Despite arriving at the stretching crags of a 350million-year-old coral reef at dawn, swimming that cold creek wasn’t even the first impressive thing I’d done that day. No. That was to meaningfully pick up the shovel and disappear off into the bush. But I’d been keen on getting to Tunnel Creek – I’d been lent a book by my shanty man Bruce about the Bunuba people’s resistance to encroaching and violent pastoralists in the 1880s, led by the heroic Jandamara who evaded capture for years by hiding in these caves. I dunno if he had to deal with crocs. And they were certainly there; as we followed the creek’s strips and pools, careful not to stumble and reach out for the wrong half naked person in the dark; little red eyes at the edges of the caves where they cringed, spread like butter against the walls. Bloody hell. And then walk towards the light, and relief dripped off me, along with the water, as daylight emerged at the other end of the tunnel, festooned with trees, littered with heron and loud with peace. Until Damo pointed out the long, deep imprint of an enormous reptilian tail in the sand, heading from whence we’d come.

‘Right guys, back through the creek again, then!’

FUCK’s sake.

On our way back, we encountered three noisy lads on giant, unicorn inflatables with tinnies. Now we’ve read a lot about crocs, or ‘croncs’ as the Gentleman has affected to call them. Salties can live in fresh or salt water and have a gland that removes the salt. They can come up to 100km upriver. They like to eat small calves, or wallabies, or wallaby sized humans like children and Chrissies. They can lean back on their tail as if it was a fifth leg, just like kangaroos, so pealing you off the roof of your ute isn’t much of an issue. They can even, apparently, climb up waterfalls. Jesus. We have agreed that, along with its weather, you don’t fuck with Australian wildlife. The hippy mantra ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ rather underestimates the boofhead courage of your average 5 metre fucking salty. But here’s an observation from The Brit Abroad, West Australians and Northern Territorians certainly have an impressive risk tolerance. Or commendable courage. Or they’re just fucken nuts. I pondered the gleeful shouts of those floating blokes the next day while drinking a cup of tea by the bank of the incomparable Manning Creek at 7am, breath caught by the misty golden beauty of the morning. Little fish swam right up to the edge where I sat, then spun round to rub their backs on the sand and flash their silver bellies to the sky. I sipped me tea and watched a white egret on the rock in the middle of the river, patient and still, next to an equally motionless penguin. … … … Why the hell is there a penguin in the Kimberley. I shaded my eyes from the sun, and it shifted, revealing the long neck of a white bellied cormorant. Righto. Animals are secretive and deceitful in this country. Remember that, Chris. What else do you need to remember? Shit. Eyes widening, I hastily interrogated the sand. I couldn’t see any croc tracks, but I took the opportune moment to get the hell away from the river’s edge.

More on crocs later.

We stayed at Manning Gorge two nights. The first day began with an hour’s walk down to the waterfall to go for a swim in the gorge. Damo was pretty convincing about toughening up – you start the walk by swimming across the creek, he said, you’ll be right, he said – there’s little blue barrels to dump your gear in, then you can just hang onto them and kick if you can’t swim. It’s hot, you’ll dry out in no time. Far out. But having done the same thing the day before in the pitch freakin’ dark and much colder water, this was, er, too easy, as they say, so in I got. It was a beautiful river, surrounded by trees, rocks to laze on, birds and the blue, blue sky, I was actually pretty energised getting in. Refreshed, we hiked over the hills through pink wildflowers and cotton flower trees that bear pretty yellow blossoms (right on the end of the branch, with no leaves; imagine a magician’s wand when it spurts a bouquet out the end) and eventually got down to the waterfalls and swimming pools of Manning Gorge. It was glorious. Red, red rocks curved their arms around us, and slabs floated in the water, sprouting shady young, green eucalypts. Vivid scarlet dragon flies landed anywhere you threw your eyes. Fishes swum up to the rocks and gawped at us and rainbows capered in the waterfall’s spray. Like, ya know those screen saves on your computer of magic places you don’t really think exist? It was just like that.

The whole adventure was very much walk to a gorge, get in the gorge, walk to another gorge, get in that one too. Which was great, because if the Gentleman and I had been driving the road alone, I don’t know we’d have committed in quite the same way. Despite the children running around with pool noodles stuffed into their rucksacks and really making a go of it. After dutifully getting in Tunnel Creek, Bell’s Gorge, Manning Gorge and the waterlilies of Galvan’s Gorge we headed off to El Questro Station across the Pentecost River.

El Questro had been talked up a fair old bit by old Greg, camp guitarist, singer, American accent talker and teller of tall tales. After five nights of sleeping in the bush, this camp site had a bar, he said. Steady on, I insisted, after all, we have campsites with bars in them even in Grimsby. (For those that don’t know, this is a thoroughly uninspiring north-east corner of the UK.) And we were packing a hell of a lot of juice – the Gentleman and I had not expected it to be quite the booze cruise it turned out, but Damo is there to be our guide and make sure we have a good holiday, and when it’s dark and the activities are done, what else is there to do but sit round the fire, drink beers and sing? A bar would at least ease the pressure on the icebox, furtively betraying us beneath our seats in the giant 4-wheel drive van by piercing our unopened cans with the combo of sharp ice and rough roads. The bar delivered (until we drank it dry), and as El Questro is an enormous cattle station, occasionally you’d see a cow wander around. These must be some of the most lean, free range organic beef cattle in the world, but who knows how many there are because there are no fences, and you have to get an external company in with helicopters and special gear to hunt down and round them up for selling. But here we were at the feet of the Cockburn Ranges (Australia pronounces all the letters, to my glee), the Pentecost River flowing by and the tall rocks heated up creeks to keep the Zebedee springs at a beautiful 38 degrees all morning. We were in them at 7am, lolling around in hot water between pandanus and ferns like a luxury tropical bathhouse. Apparently, they chuck all the proles out at midday and then the hot springs are the exclusive reserve of the posh lodges where celebrities are helicoptered in. They can keep it – who wants to be in hot water after midday? They’ve missed the best bit! True to that, we left Zebedee springs to hike to Emma Gorge; the coldest waterfall of the tour. Striding up the rocks we passed a limpid blue, sunlit and sparkling pool. Can’t we stop here, Damo? No. Get in the cold one. So we did and it was the true sublime; my breath was taken away by water kept in the shade all day by the enormous cliff surrounding it, the water was deep and murky, I swam towards the yawning black wall that was so tall as to block the great fiery sun and my soul expanded in the terror.

Right after I got out, someone shouted that they’d found a hot spring by the other wall. Bastard.