Yet another gorgeous day: our 4th on the Gibb

Today we got up nice and slowly, taking our time, even though it got hot really quickly! The reason behind our slow start, other than because we can, was we saw many other campers leaving bright and early (through our tent window) to the gorge. We did not want to get there and it be packed so why not let them go ahead, we could catch up later and hopefully have it all to ourselves.

After a warm and somewhat rushed (because it was hot) breakfast and packup, we decided to head towards the gorge ourselves. The walk was advertised at being approximately 2.5km through dense bush and rocky cliff sections, so it recommended to take lots of water and food as it could take a about 1.5 hours each way. With only one bottle between us, and only half filled we began our journey, we did have a small bag of nuts though so we were doing pretty good.

The first park of the walk to the gorge begins with a beautiful pool, with white sand and a little tiny in which you can pull back and forth to not get wet while crossing. You can also swim across but who would do that when you can pull yourself across right!?

The walk to the gorge was nice but long! It took us just over an hour so we were making good pace, but along the way it got extremely warm with the sun at peak. When we arrived at the gorge and the anticipated view, the water was extremely inviting. This was our view entering into the pool and the waterfall:

We practically fell into the water and probably sizzled as we did so, that water was so nice! The pool was massive and there were not too many people there so while swimming we had the place almost to ourselves, bar those few people you can see in the picture above. We swam all the way over to the waterfall and went underneath it, which was pretty spectacular.

After a few dives into the water and some baking in the sun, we reluctantly decided to walk back to camp and our car to continue our journey. The way back always seems to be that little faster, maybe because you remember the way and which parts are easy, who knows because this did not exactly happen for us. We got a little lost on the way back. The gorges that are not apart of the national parks, like this one, were not marked in the best way, however we were not necessarily looking up enough to notice when they did appear, opps. Not to worry we found our way, after first leading a family with kids in the wrong direction with us.

We practically fell into the pool we had crossed at the beginning once we got back to it, a lovely family took our bags over in the boat for us, keeping them dry and we had a delicious swim to the other side.

When we got back to our car it was around lunch time, so we had been pretty productive given our lazy morning, but not too long after we were on the Gibb again and heading in the direction of Mt Elizabeth Station. On the way to this station we had planned to stop off at Barnett River Gorge, which was a small drive just off the Gibb, however we somehow missed the sign and turnoff. Later we found out that there was in fact no sign for this gorge turn off, and that it was well worth the stop for the gorge and to camp.

We arrived at Mt Elizabeth Station after entering what seemed like a hundred cattle gates (there were three I think) and we found a lovely little spot in the afternoon sun to set up. We relaxed a little in that sun and caught up on a little blog writing. There were 9 cars including us and the station’s camping area was very big so it was extremely quiet.

We saw they had a Telstra phone and we had picked up a phone card beforehand, so we thought we would make a quick call to the parents to let them know we were ok thus far. I called my mum first which was lovely and then Alex called his dad afterwards. Sorry everyone else, we couldn’t call for long so we hope they passed on our love!

 

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