Back to the Outback

I know I haven’t written up the Bungles yet (due solely to laziness, as I have all the notes ready), but I’ll just have a start of the recent Drysdale River trip before I head out on the next one (back to the Mitchell Plateau, where I may have the internet to post some more, we’ll see).

After a break in town between the Bungles trip (during which I sang some Queen and Adele at karaoke, danced lindy hop with two DPAW employees, how random is that, and recovered from a week bushwalking through spinifex grass), we prepped for our exciting helicopter trip (exciting only to me, really, since everyone else had been on a helicopter before. Even though I almost was rescued by one – I see you Pasha, my fellow dive disaster buddy – I to date hadn’t actually been in one before).

And so on Friday, the 16^th of August, we packed up all our stuff and headed out towards the Mitchell Plateau, but this time we would be turning off at Carson River, a different spot, camping there overnight, and then catching a helicopter out the next morning. We passed the Cockburn (pronounced “Coe-burn”) Ranges again, where they filmed “Australia,” and drove over the Pentecost River (the one that may just maybe have saltwater crocodiles). The water was down really low compared to the last time I was there, back at the end of June, but we didn’t stop or anything to check it out.

We kept going and breaked for tea on the side of the road, where we could just make out a little gorge off to the side. Soon after that we realized that our bunged-up spring from the original Mitchell trip was acting up again, and we’d have to replace it. Fortunately we made it safely to the Drysdale River Station so we could have lunch and fix it at the same time. I learned a bit about how to replace a spring while watching Richard work under the trailer, but mostly I just enjoyed not sitting squished in the car for a little while (we have to sit pretty packed to fit three people in the cab, and I actually told the others the sardine poem that I remembered from elementary school that was something like this:

A baby sardine saw its first submarine

It was scared, and watched through a peephole

“Don’t be, son,” said the sardine’s mum,

“It’s only a tin full of people!”

I think that’s the first time I’ve put a poem inside of a parenthetical, but it was worth it.)

With our newly-fixed spring we continued on the road past the turnoff for the Mitchell Falls and towards Carson River. I really noticed this trip how moist everything gets as you go north, especially compared to the Bungles, when we went south and it got a lot more arid. We started seeing greenery and palms everywhere. After the turnoff it was quite a windy and bumpy road and I was feeling a bit “average,” as the Aussies say when actually you’re feeling terrible (in context after a Friday night: “I woke up feeling pretty average/ordinary”) but we finally got to the river crossing, avoiding cattle running across the road several times (they were everywhere!). The Carson River was barely flowing at that point, but fortunately when we got to the airstrip, where we would make camp, it was deeper and we could use the water for drinking (cross my fingers I don’t get sick, but apparently we were in such remote country that the river and creek water, provided it was flowing, was perfectly safe to drink…let you know in a week if that is hooey or not).

We were meeting up with Rohan, who’s in charge of a crew of aboriginal rangers from the “Balingarra mob” (another Aussie slang tidbit: “mob” means any sort of group, but especially used for the different aboriginal groups in the area). There were four guys, ranging from 19-year-old Scott, to Leo and Quintin, to the older, more veteran ranger, Phillip, who also went as Byron (I never got it straight which was actually his name). They had arrived the day before and already had a fire going with a roast cooking in a big camp oven. We were planning on eating the first of our army ration meals (more on them later, they’re so cool!) but instead we got a nice meal and finished off the esky of beer that Richard had brought specifically for the first night at camp. There were also a few (none-too-classy) jokes told and a billy was boiled, although I thought it was much too hot and humid for tea, even at night.

Add to that scene the super bright half-moon overhead and the ground burned beneath the tents, and it was a quintessential outback evening in the north Kimberley.