Day Seven - El Questro Gorge

at some point in psycholand we must have dropped from exhaustion, because we woke the following morning toasty and warm and well rested. g was never at risk of being hacked to pieces by a psycho thirsty for young blood because 40 hardly counts as young now does it? sunrise was glorious. what you must remember is that we didn't really use much artificial light, so between sunset and sunrise, there was a whole lot of sleeping going on. the nights there were 13 hours long, so it was a hell of a lot of sleeping! we needed it.

off we went down the gibb river road toward the el questro wilderness park - a privately owned 10,000 square kilometre cattle station-turned-tourist facility that encompassed several gorges, mountain ranges, rivers and hot springs.

on the way we did some river crossings through crocodile infested waters!

arriving at el questro, we had enough daylight for one walk, so we headed on up the el questro gorge - a riverbed thick with lush vegetation and palm trees that passed several kilometres up a gorge filled with crystal-blue water, all the way to a frighteningly cold plunge pool fed by a small waterfall and populated by massive angry wasps (the insects, not the old fat tourists - though they were worse.) incidentally, we had to scramble up waterfalls and over boulders to get through the gorge - not something for those with inadequate necks of femur - so unlike the rest of el questro wilderness park, the gorge was blessedly free of the grey brigade.

we spent most of our time at a little rockhole half way up - warm and welcoming and wasp-free.

then it was time to set up camp. because the whole area was private property, we weren't allowed to camp anywhere except for designated expensive camping areas, so had to find something tucked away where we could hide ourselves for the night and avoid that capitalist nonsense. initially we stumbled upon an old quarry, but the fear came back, so after a few panicked loops in which the exit road seemed to have disappeared, we moved on to our greatest find: tier gorge. though there was a couple fucking there when we arrived, they soon left and we had the whole place to ourselves for the night. more about it in the next blog! below are some roadside pics as we passed through el questro!