El Questro Day 4 - Amalia Gorge

Well well well…. I am afraid the boat cruise was a bit of false advertising! It should be called party boat/booze float…. OMG my recollection of yesterday’s afternoon is somewhat limited. We boarded the boat at 3pm and so did other retirees. Off we went down the Chamberlain Gorge that is 150km. We only did probably 300 m 🙈… the nature was stunning, but could not see any animals including any crocodiles instead after cruising the 300m for about 25min we stopped and were handed some pellets that strongly resembled pellets we feed our alpacas with… the instructions were clear - stick your finger out and the small fish will collect water in their mouth and spit it to the finger - target. For that we were supposed to reward them. There was also a second activity going on which I totally engaged in… the bottles of sparkling wine were opened and the refreshing drink was offered… I think I must have been quite thirsty after all day so in the ‘activity time’ I manage to have maybe three glasses 😇… the cruise became much more interesting. I even saw a bird and when showing it to Kat I completely forgot about the spitting fish and foolishly I have pointed with my finger over the water towards the bird…. I got a full on spit into my open eye…. Perfect aim…. Left me blind and speechless for a second…
Anyhow we have completed the cruise and Kat drove me home where I whipped up risotto for dinner and sandwiches for today’s walk.
To our disappointment the solar panels were not charging the batteries so we were not using any lights or anything except of the fridge. But we are still loving our new campsite !👍🏻The batteries were not charged for last 5 days except for the short drive from Kununurra to El Questro.
We played canasta last night - 3 games as usual and in some luck I managed to turn the score. Kat did not seem to digest this and requested a 4th game and she whipped my ass again… oh well there is always tomorrow 😉
I finally set up my camera for some night photography so did a little bit of shooting only to discover that Kat’s phone takes better night photos with minimal effort… hmm 🤔

We got up really early today to discover that the batteries are not capable to run the fridge anymore. Thankfully we have some frozen bottles of water in so if we don’t keep opening it it will last for tomorrow. I will also try to charge it a little with the car when we get back.
We were at the Amalia Gorge walk just after 7am, we were the first ones. The track was not great - pretty much a walk on the bottom of the river bed that had no water. The trail was only stones, sand paths were minimal. We had to do some - in our eyes - challenging rock climbs. In one section they had chains but the other sections were just unsupported and we had to engaged all limbs and bums…
Although the track was not that foot friendly, the scenery was amazing. White paperbark trees, palms, running clear water and pools, red rock, sun and light breeze… just wowsie!
Amalia Gorge was impressive, the waterfall was quite high. The water was freezing cold and we only braved it in up to the knees.
While we were there we munched on our breakfast and also lunch to help with the nervous breakdown experience of climbing the rocks and the vision of doing it again on the way back.
We left Amalia Gorge and headed for a swim at the pool just below - Ochre Pool. The descent was challenging and at some point onlookers even gave a Kat an applause when she did make it.
We were amazed to bumped to a mother and daughter duo who were shoeless and had a baby `~5 months old….that they carried just freely on their hip. When we saw them crossing the part with the chain and the kid literally hanging in the air we had to look away… Cannot even imagine how they walked bare feet on the rocks that were stinky hot! Crazy.
We made it back to the base where we are refreshing with another cold ginger beer, using the wifi and downloading info how to connect solar panels to the batterie to see if the dude in the workshop did it correctly.Baca selengkapnya