Wednesday 23rd June - Karijini National Park

Karijini really is all about the gorges.  We returned to Hamersley Gorge from our nearby bush camp to do the three hour return walk up the gorge to a fern lined pool.

What a difference the time of day makes to your impressions of a place.  The morning sun penetrated the gorge walls and illuminated the crystal clear pools at the base, with nobody around but us.  I do believe I heard “Wow!” being uttered.

We saved our swim for after our walk (which actually took less than two hours), the hardest thing about the trail was working out where the track went as it was unsigned.

It was so refreshing plunging into the cool water afterwards, and we floated around for a while before descending into the bottom pool and swimming down the gorge for a 100m or so.

An Austrian Defender pulled into the parking area as we were making lunch.  At least we aren’t the only people crazy enough to bring over our own vehicle.

It took over an hour to drive to Oxer Lookout where four gorges meet (Karijini is Western Australia’s second largest national park at 627,422 hectares, i.e. big).

From here we descended down two of the gorges, Weano and Hancock, to better appreciate their scale.  Both would require a swim to reach Junction Pool, where the gorges meet, and having been wet already today we decided to return the way we came.  The interplay between red walls, blue sky, lush vegetation and cool water created great photographic opportunities, and so far each gorge has had something different to offer.

It’s also nice to be the last vehicle in the car park at the end of the day, although we couldn’t stay as camping wasn’t allowed.  However, we have another nice bush camp with a very bright, almost full moon shining down on us - we almost don’t need head torches.  Unfortunately it does illuminate the massive amount of red dust collecting in the Land Rover which is getting a bit out of control.  We’ll have to think about what can be done to stop the dust getting in so much as it’s starting to make life difficult (and get into places it shouldn’t, like cameras, despite all our best efforts). SPOT