Saturday 20 July 2013

14 July – 15 July 2013 – Mt Barnett Station, Manning Gorge



It was so good to be sleeping back in the van last night rather than on our deflating air mattresses.  We were in bed just after 8.30pm and didn’t get up until around 7am.  There wasn’t much to do this morning except wait for the Harris’s to arrive.  It was around mid-morning when we heard them radio through to us and they were on their way in – phew!  They set up the caravan while Josh went for a quick run back 7kms to the roadhouse to pick up a few groceries.  Unfortunately, he didn’t get there.  Instead, he’d heard a knock from under the car and so turned back towards the caravan to see what it was.  It turns out that both rear lower shock bushes (which he’d only replaced whilst in Cairns) had worn completely through.  We didn’t have any spares so he had to work out a way to replace these.  Josh came up with a solution – we had a couple of pairs of spare thongs and a neighbour had some rubber matting so he went to work and made some new suspension bushes.  He cut and rolled the rubber to make the bush and cut the thongs for the ends.  Whilst doing that, Shaun went over his rig and noticed that the van had cracked the leaf spring mount off the chassis, also due to corrugations.  After asking around, Shaun found a fellow, Hank, that had a welder on board and so he too went about fixing his problems.  In the meantime, I went about a bit of cooking (not my finest work) to pass the time.  Josh ended up making the 7km trek to the Mt Barnett Roadhouse later this afternoon, taking Zoe, Sami and Olivia with him.  There was even a Dutch guy working in the roadhouse so, to Olivia’s surprise, Josh got talking to the young guy in their own little language.  He had picked up some delicious fruit as well as a few other supplies just to get us through a few more days.  Upon his return, it had become quite hot so we all went for the short 100 metre walk to the river for the cool refreshing swim and got chatting to other travellers to find out what we had to look forward to at the other end of the Gibb River Road.  Tonight, the adults sat up chatting while the kids played a music game, I think it was even after 10pm that we went to bed.
Another week began, and this lovely Monday morning we were still at Manning Gorge intending to do the walk into the gorge early in the morning, then pack and leave by around lunch time to continue on the journey.  We were up early and so I decided that seeing as though I hadn’t seen a laundry for a while, that I would use our little washing machine to get a few things de-dusted.  I got through most of it and the water was every time I refilled the water, it was absolutely filthy!  It was good to get that out of the way.  It was getting on and we didn’t end up leaving until about 9am, but off we went and the weather was heating up.  In order to start this walk, you have to cross the river, and as it was hot we opted to swim across.  However, we were carrying a bag of water, the camera bag, a towel, etc. so we put these things into the boat with Shaun and Liz to avoid them getting wet.  On the other side, we dried off a little, got dressed, loaded ourselves up with bags again and set off.  It was quite hot by now and we had about a 2.5km walk into the waterfall.  It wasn’t a hard walk although there was a bit of a downhill towards the end.  Josh and the kids jumped straight into the water before they even saw the waterfall and it was a quite a way around the bend to the actual waterfall so Shaun, Liz and myself picked up all the bags and bits and pieces to walk around the rock ledge to the other side.  In doing so, Liz had a bit of a fall and damaged a few fingers but we patched her up and she was up quickly and soldiered on.  Around the other side was magnificent.  There was a big splash pool area, lots of sunshine and a huge rock wall to jump from.  The rock was quite dark and smooth and there were only a few families already here to share this fantastic spot with.  There were a lot of ledges to jump from all at different heights and Sami was a bit unsure and scared about how long she would be under the water so her and I gradually advanced up a few small ledges to her comfort zone.  However, Josh was straight in from one of the highest ledges that even some little kids were jumping off.  Walk straight up and just jump, sounds like the best strategy however if it was me, I would have stood on the edge for a very long time considering my options… funny how you change as you get older.  Zoe jumped off the second highest ledge just before leaving but just the once as we had to get back, pack the van and move on to the next stop.  We began heading back through the bush bound for the river crossing and into the camp where our van was.  We’d cooked up some sausages, had lunch and started to pack up the van when the Harris’s returned.  There was a change of plans when they had returned as they felt it was getting too late to move on so we unpacked again but ready enough to leave early the next morning.  Late this afternoon, we sat and watched the movie Red Dog… we are getting closer to Dampier now.  After having dinner, the girls had an early night to bed and Josh and I sat up to watch another movie – Josh didn’t make the end of it.

















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