Gibb River Road - Part 1

The Kimberley region is about the combined size of Germany and Austria (and has about 38K inhabitants - the population of Dreieich). A road through this area in north-southerly direction does simply not exist, but there are two roads in west-easterly direction. One of those is a normal highway - too normal for us. So we use the other one, the Gibb River Road. This road is 400 miles long and mainly unsealed. And it is dotted with fords ...

Our adventure on the Gibb starts in El Questro, a cattle farm. In its area there are a number of gorges, which we wanted to hike. Again, we could combine the streneous hiking with relaxing bathing in some pools in the rivers, or in waterfall plunge pools. Despite all possibilities to relax, the efforts of hiking did win - both the Amalia Gorge and the El Questro Gorge were rated grade 5 (of 5), only the Emma Gorge was grade 4 ... All those gorges had been really nice, with tropical flora all around, and often very narrow, so that no sunlight ever reached the ground. During one of those hikes, Matthias managed to fall off a rock into some water pool - now the movie camera is damaged :-( ...

After two nights in El Questro, we headed on. Next, we came to the infamous Pentecost river crossing, a 70-80m wide river with some crocodiles in. But, the first car we saw there crossing gave us the green light: The water level was pretty low, and it was no problem at all to cross the river - we just headed on and did not understand why the Aussies made a bigger story out of this. Later on, there was a longer stretch with not so much highlights, but we could have attended some live tutorials in tyre changing ...