- Part 1: The Universe Gives Me A Nudge
- Part 2: Bangkok & Rest & Realisation In Koh Lanta
- Part 3: Singapore Slings & Bali Tranquility
- Part 4: A Trip To The Place Where Oceans Collide
- Part 5: Geraldton, Woodchopping & Kalbarri Majesty
- Part 6: Monkey Mia, Ningaloo Reef & A Deep Sense Of Dread
- Part 7: The Tent & The Bull
- Part 8: The Sky Turns Red & The Earth Glows Orange
- Part 9: The Overwhelming Power Of Untamed Nature
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This is going to be a shorter blog as I simply cannot distil into words the enormity of what I felt at Purnululu National Park.
There were just three of us on the trip as I joined Bec, the tour leader, and Daniela, a Swiss solo traveller navigating Western Australia in a 4WD.
We bonded from the first moment.
As well as working as a tour leader, Bec runs a cattle station with her family.
A Gija woman, she grew up in Woolah Country (also known as Doon Doon), a tiny outstation community near Purnululu and is fluent in the Gija, Wola and Kriol Indigenous languages.
We bounced along the tracks in the 4WD and visited the Echidna Chasm with its bright red steep-sided gorge walls and palm trees, scrambling over a creek bed until we reached the chasm.
We explored and clambered around as Bec shared Aboriginal song.
We sipped ginger beer as the sun set to turn the sky red and orange before heading off to our camp site which we were sharing with another group who were on a bus tour of the Kimberley.
Bec cooked kangaroo tail which we ate with pasta followed by chocolate pudding and performed an Aboriginal smoking ceremony, a tradition which dates back 60,000 years.
On day two we visited the Bungle Bungle Range. Feminine, soft contours with orange and black beehive domes that rise 300m from the ground.
Water pounding through in the wet season has created a huge amphitheatre of red rock and a permanent pool of water at the Cathedral Gorge.
The Cathedral Gorge is accessed through the beehive-shaped domes formed by sandstone deposited more than 360 million years ago. Erosion carved their shape and contours with orange and black bands in the last 20 million years.
We were dwarfed by the gorge, just tiny little specks. The only living creature was a solitary butterfly that flew within a couple of feet of me and flew away again.
It was all on an immense scale and yet so still.
And time felt different, suspended. I felt like I’d gone through a portal where time seemed to vanish and the world fell silent.
It made me realise the description that’s often used when talking about Australia and in particular the Outback as a vast emptiness is totally one-dimensional.
Rather than there be “nothing there,” it’s actually full of life and nature and diverse landscapes and thousands of years of history.
We drove the beautiful route back up to Kununurra once more and the wild horses were there again.
I couldn’t sleep that night because I was so impacted by what I’d experienced and seen.
Everything had been perfect. Bec’s stories and songs; our happy trio; nature’s grandeur – everything. It had been the last trip of the season before the park shut down and the universe had brought the three of us together.