Thursday 15th July - Purnululu National Park to Spring Creek Rest Stop

There must be something about 4:30am and camping as Anne was woken by our neighbour’s alarm going off at that unholy hour. I slept through until my slumber was broken an hour later by a troop of chimpanzees at play in the tree outside our tent. Anne says it’s more likely cockatoos were responsible for the chattering, but I stick by my version of events.

Cathedral Gorge was our first stop today where we were lucky with our timing as we managed to visit between tour groups and got the place almost to ourselves.

The gorge is impressive but I was a little underwhelmed as this is meant to be the “must do” attraction in the park. We both preferred the striped beehive domes, the result of preferential weathering of joints and weaknesses in the sandstone plateau over the last 20 million years.

The grey banding is due to the presence of cyanobacteria which inhabit the top few millimetres of those sandstone layers having a higher clay content (which retains moisture). The orange bands are layers with a lower clay content which have dried more quickly and are therefore unfavourable for the growth of cyanobacteria. Oxidation of the iron in the sandstone gives the colouration.

A walk along the Piccininny Creek bed allows you to fully appreciate the domes, although it is hard to reconcile the hot, dry conditions of today with the forces that must be at work at other times of the year to so deeply erode the bedrock, scouring channels over 2m deep in places.

Anne’s knee was playing up a bit, so rather than walk too far we found a nice shady spot under a tree for a small siesta before having our picnic lunch. SPOT

No-one passed us in the couple of hours we were there, proving that even in popular tourist destinations you can find your own quiet spot if you try. On the way back we also discovered a rock window which surprisingly hasn’t been made into a park attraction as it isn’t that far from Cathedral Gorge.

There’s been a nice breeze the last couple of days which helped cool us down as we explored the creek bed. A guy in Kununurra said they have been having abnormally high temperatures recently - it was 35oC during the day when we were there and only dropped by 10oC at night. However, our shortwave radio picked up an Alice Springs station yesterday morning as we were having breakfast (thanks Ruth and Graeme for the present) which said that the current temperature there was 6oC. That will make a refreshing change.

We made it to the Kungkalahai lookout for sunset before heading out of the park and back to the rest stop for the night, so here’s the promised photo.