WYNDHAM / Sea At Last!

In the end we couldn't get out of Kununurra too soon - not because of any problem with the town so much as the backpackers in our caravan park keeping us awake all night, the grey nomads with their caravans packed in shoulder to shoulder on all sides, and a bit of a sense that we hadn't come all this way just so we could hang out in a town and drink coffee all day.  So we gave up our plans to spend Mel's birthday relaxing under a tree, packed ourselved up, and hit the road.  [actually, to be more accurate, Gav did the packing up.  And in his eagerness to prove that he was a big boy who could do it all by himself he successfully reversed the car into the camper trailer.  Happy birthday darling.]

We set out through the East Kimberley - vast dry open ranges and distant gorges.  We'd heard of a little out-of-the-way place called Parry's Lagoon where we could camp, and we found it down a corrugated road not far from Wyndham, a little tumbleweedy sort of a town on the coast.  Parry's Lagoon was one of the great finds of our trip - nothing spectacular, but a quiet little campground run a couple who cooked up homestyle meals for us (such a relief after some of the crap we'd been eating!) which we shared with a select group of companions, including some very sincere bird-watchers.  They (the bird-watchers that is) would say things like: "we got 60 this morning" and "that one's a Yellow-Tinted" and "have you seen any Gouldians?".  They were far more interesting than drunken backpackers, and we even got in a bit of bird-watching ourselves: Plumed Whistling Ducks, Brolgas, Grey-Crowned Babblers, a Brown Goshawk and our very first Mistletoebird - among many more.

We stayed 3 nights at Parry's and used it as our base for exploring Wyndham and some of waterholes in the area.  It's an area I'd be happy to explore some more one day - the landscape feels a lot like central Australia, but with stunning little water-filled oases tucked away here and there.  And, or course, The Sea.

The photos:
 / five rivers lookout at Wyndham
 / Old Wyndham
 / The Wyndham train
 / Emma Gorge lower waterhole
 / and higher waterhole
 / reflections in The Grotto
 / a Kimberley sunset