Karijini National Park

On our day off in the Kimberleys, Kevin takes the riders to the Gibb Rover Road. This is quite an infamous adventure road, 590kms of dirt and plenty of river crossings. It’s not for this trip. The rainy season has been so bad that most if it remains closed to traffic, but the riders get to have fun on the first 60kms to the Pentecost River. The Pentecost is deep and wide and by the looks on a couple of 4WD’s coming through the waters would be over the cyclinder heads, not to mention how much the 4WDS are bouncing from side to side, the invisible river bed must be pretty rocky. With still another 4000kms in Australia and a whole final section from Bangkok to Europe still ahead, everyone admires the view, plays at the water’s edge and leaves crossing this raging torrent to the 4WDs. There are plenty of small creeks and mud puddles back along the 60kms to the main road.


From the Kimberleys we head to the small seaside town of Broome and the beautiful stretch of white sands and turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, called Cable Beach. This feels like a traditional holiday – sun, sand, sea. We pop into the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile farm, a sort of rehabilitation place for bad tempered crocs terrorising the public along some of the creeks, except they don’t get out. It’s a life behind bars, being feed and watered and their off spring to becoming handbags!

Broome to Port Hedland ranks as one of the most hypnotic rides on the planet. These are straight roads at their best, with an upsurge of the amount of road trains, all used for transporting the iron ore mined here. Port Hedland is a stopover, a mining town, where prices are sky high because the mining industry can pay whatever it has to. Still it brings us closer to our diversion into the Karijini National Park, some dirt roads and amazing gorges.

We turn off inland and finally, the roads starts to curve gently over the Hamersley Range, ridges, escarpments and crags appear. Once in Karijini, it’s a great dirt road to get to see Weano Gorge from Oxers Lookout. The dirt flies up coats everything and stains the tyres a deep red. Getting out from the gorge was harder for some than others. 8kms from the end of the road, the gravel suddenly deepened and the good track that had been easy to follow disappeared into a sea of pebbles. The best of us, lurched as the bike skated from side to side and for those with little dirt experience, it was the undoing of what had been a great ride. Alas, Ingo on the hire bike went down (and so did his AUD$2000 deposit) and Angelica’s sterling effort also ended with her and the bike splatted. Thankfully both were just bumped and bruised and the bikes were none the worse – just cosmetically they sported a few scrapes.

We stopped over in Tom Price. There’s just the one motel and filled with miners and construction workers. Once again, Terry’s attempts to order a night cap of a straight whisky were thwarted by the strict drinking rules here. Makers Mark would only be served as a single in a glass full of ice and tonic. Sacrilege! A few minutes before ten o’clock, everything stopped and we had to be out. Saturday night in Tom Price is not the most exciting of experiences! The irony of it all was that outside the bar was a bottle shop, which would sell you a whole bottle of Makers Mark that you could drink neat straight from the bottle – provided you were in your room with your door shut! No drinking in public.