2006/07 Australia trip - Weano Gorge, Karijini |
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As usual the day warmed up as the sun rose over the cliffs. The park has two major scenic areas, each with its own 
campground, and we were going to move from the Dales Gorge to the Weano Gorge area. As we were about to leave, this young dingo came trotting through the campground, checking out the sites to see what people had left. We were told that they are a big problem at night times too, running off with any leather boots that are left outside.
We stopped at the nearby visitor’s centre to buy a few souvenirs and then took the deep red gravel road towards Weano. Along the way we met an emu with nine chicks in tow. Maybe that’s why we hadn’t seen any since South Australia: at least half of them had been sitting on eggs. It’s the Dad emus that look after the chicks.
Our book describes the Weano campground, but Weano has been closed and replaced by the new Savannah campground, run by the aborigines. It cost twice as much but we got little extra for our money. Judging by the line-ups in the morning, some more bathrooms would be a good idea. The aborigines seem to be putting elaborate tent cabins onto all the camp sites, which seems an odd thing to do, as most people don’t want to spend that kind of money and just want to use their own tents or campers. A real business enterprise might put just a half-dozen in at first to see if they made money, but this looks like a government-funded project.
Above ground, the area has gently rolling hills with rock outcrops, but the really spectacular scenery is below ground, where the streams have cut deep gorges with sheer walls of red rock.
We drove to the Joffre Gorge and saw a waterfall that drops hundreds of feet into the gorge. A little further on was the Knox Gorge, another great red gash in the earth. These gorges are very difficult to photograph as 
the walls in the sun are blazing with light, while those in shadow appear inky black. There’s just too much contrast. We had the same problem when we got to the Weano area and the Junction Pool Overlook where four gorges come together: the Hancock, the Red, the Joffre, and the Weano. The overlook is on a promontory surrounded by these four gorges, so, as well as the problem with contrast, the sheer scale of the view is overwhelming, rather like looking down into the Grand Canyon. Hancock Gorge is named after Lang Hancock, the “father of the asbestos industry”. Needless to say, he was and is a controversial figure.
On our way around these overlooks, we kept meeting up with a couple from Melbourne: it turned out that we’d visited a lot of the same places in Australia and England.
After all this gazing down, we just had to go down into one of these gorges and we chose the Weano gorge. After we got down to the floor of the gorge it didn’t look too promising. I took the water route and had to quit when the cameras were about to go under. Sandie climbed partway up the cliff and got a little further but still couldn’t get past the first deep pool. The other direction worked out a lot better and we managed to make our way up a small waterfall and along a cliff through a hole in the rock. There we met a young English couple who warned us that the area we were planning on going to next, Coral Bay on the coast, had full campgrounds for the next week because of the school holidays.
We climbed out of the gorge and made it back to the campground just in time to enjoy the sunset and then we dived inside as the temperature tumbled again to another cold night.
Wednesday July 19th
We woke up to a frost. Frost in the Tropics! It’s not as if we were high in the mountains, just out in the desert. Luckily, the wind had dropped and the day soon warmed up.