Well it was time to leave Kununurra and start the final leg across the top to Broome a total of 1060 km that’s without any side trips. We would have to have a stop at Fitzroy Crossing.
We packed up quite early and were on the road by 8am. Kununurra a population of about 6000 nowadays was originally based on the cattle industry with vast stations one of them being the one million acre Durack homestead and property which is now deep under Lake Argyle when it was flooded in 1971 to form a storage reservoir and is the largest manmade lake in Australia. As we headed out we saw some great rock formations (the Durack Ranges) and kilometres of flat terrain with scattered bush
Boabs in all shapes and sizes and here many of the rivers with some water in them which unusual as most are completely dried up by now until the start of the wet in November. We skirted around the Argyle Diamond mine where entry was forbidden unless authorised (100% owned by Santos and the largest diamond mine in the world) and kept on and on. The roads are being extensively worked on with $230 million being spent building a new highway which resulted in numerous diversions for us along red dirt roads as they are being graded and relayed before the bitumen. The water crossings are being eliminated by the building of new bridges across the floodway’s and rivers that develop during the wet which normally make many sections of this highway impassable for many weeks. So there were many places we had to stop at control points and then only travel at 40 kph which slowed us down. We had a break at Warmun 196 kms south of Kununurra for fuel; here Slingair has a plane based for Bungle Bungle scenic flights. Carrying on for the next leg to Halls Creek it just went on and on running alongside vast cattle stations of thousands of acres such as Springvale, Alice Downs to name a couple. We stopped at Halls Creek to fill up with fuel and have our lunch and pressed on having missed the annual Rodeo which had been on the previous weekend. We passed the turn off for the Tanami track and pressed on to Fitzroy Crossing. Having previously visited these places we just wanted to keep going. Cruising along at 90 kph on roads that had been mostly been upgraded was endless. We couldn’t recall Fitzroy crossing when we arrived, however we stopped at the Fitzroy River Lodge Resort, a very upmarket place, we just parked in the overflow part of the caravan park as they were booked out. By night fall many other travellers had also joined us. Here what I had been dreading happened; as we were opening up the trailer the car just locked itself, with my keys inside and also our spare set. Unable to open the car we thought what next, when a couple sitting outside the trailer having a cup of tea came over and said no problem! And with that he went to his trailer and produced an old coil of rusty wire and a screw driver and with me holding the top part of the door open he pushed the wire through and opened the door just like that! We couldn’t thank him enough and thought how lucky we had been. He even took our spare key and securely attached it hidden under the car so if I was caught out again I would be OK. He had experienced the same problem and had done the same for himself. We invited them over for drinks but as it was his wife’s birthday they were off to the lodge for a special birthday dinner treat. We went to bed tired but happy that our car problem had been resolved so easily,thanks to Dean and Jackie.
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