batteries fully recharged in every sense of the word, we woke with a renewed vigour on a tuesday morning surrounded by the grandeur of the baobabs, trees that one could worship.
next to the campsite was a river that would eventually lead to manning gorge itself - a good hour of hiking downstream over a hot, barren plateau, or 1.5 hours if, like g, you humour my acute sense of direction and have a little bushbash to begin with. to get to the track, one had to traverse this deep river, and styrofoam boxes were provided so that one could put one's clothing and camera inside and emerge on the opposite bank with valuables unmolested. it was nifty.
flies were our constant companion. are they actually good for anything except for spreading cholera, typhus and irritating people? apparently when mao zedong decided that he didn't like flies during the great proletarian cultural revolution and ordered them to be killed off, their numbers were decimated throughout china but the circle of life continued, unaware and unaffected. why not try something similar in australia? anyway, these flies at manning gorge: they loved the frog.
other insects of beauty are much more acceptable, like this gorgeous dragonfly, whose wings it is said provide evidence against the existence of any gods.
manning gorge
and then we arrived. there's not much to say really - it was a fricken paradise. each gorge we visited supplanted the previous as the most glorious!
after a heavy dose of basking and leaping from the rocks, we headed on down the road towards barnett river gorge. there were some glorious roadside sites, and some barriers along the way...
barnett river gorge
the actual location of this gorge was a mystery, as cairns seemed to populate the landscape in every direction, and the place had been recently burnt off by locals to prevent bushfires and regenerate vegetation. in fact there were vast areas that were still smouldering. the gorge bucked the trend and was in fact full of algae and not really that stunning at all. hey if it was down the street i wouldn't be complaining though! gorgeous got redefined up there in that sunburnt country.
back at the campsite that morning, g had claimed that we could use ash to clean our clothes, as he'd seen a documentary on the internet about a family somewhere in france who used the alkaline powder to do their weekly washing in an effort to be more biofriendly. we thought we'd put it to the test, and collected a bag of ash to scrub our clothing with upon arrival at the gorge.
it worked!
then it was time for a pretty massive drive along the corrugated gibb river road in a race against the sun to see how far we could get toward el questro before the animals started to claim the road as their own and made driving a mortal combat in which we were likely to come off second best. there's nothing you can do to avoid that red dust - it passes through hermetically sealed containers to deposit itself with pleasure on every available surface within a 100 km radius of a passing wheel. check out g's eyelashes coated in the stuff! even our bedsheet and sleeping bags got coated, which was less fun when the itch set in late at night.
in the last dusky red rays of the day, we pulled over and set up camp in psycholand. weeks later, we would look back onto that night with some confusion as to what actually happened. the facts stand that we camped at an abandoned mine site, somewhat similar to the setting of any b-grade australian outback horror flick in which young adults are slaughtered by the dozen by chainsaw-weilding psychos. initially we left this possibility unconsidered, but after the sun set and i went for a walk in the dark, i had the misfortune to be hit in the back of the head by what i assumed was a wayward bat, but may have been an enormous moth or any other insect the size of an outstretched human palm, colliding with my head with the same force as a slap. i was startled - i screamed - and before long i had the fear. whether or not i later claimed to g that there had been several murders in the area and that the killer(s) were still on the loose is a matter of conjecture. g became contaminated with the fear, and we both clawed our way back into jasper, locked and closed all doors and windows, and then spent what felt like hours rocking back and forth keeping a bleary vigil against bloodthirsty psychos.
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