Day 73 Geikie Gorge

 This morning we packed up and said farewell to Ian, Meredith, Brenda and David. Feeling grateful and blessed for the fun, laughs, team work and memories we have created and shared in doing the Gibb River Road in Clippers together. We moved on from Broome and back down the road towards Derby, but turned off onto the Great Northern Highway. A fairly straight road, we stopped for lunch by a giant boab tree, and continued on until we reached Fitzroy Crossing. 

Every now and then you’ll go through an area where there are thousands of anthills, the colour of which obviously changes depending upon the soil in the area . I haven’t taken a photo of the ones around where we are tonight yet , but they look like, well diprotodon do do. It looks like the dinosaurs have just dumped stuff everywhere.  There you go. Yet another glimpse into my brain. 

We drove through town and out to Geikie Gorge. At Geikie Gorge, there was an easy and very short walk that passed some dark grey layered rocks and escarpments on one side, and we walked out to where the water was. We sat down and took the time to observe the gorge. On the other side of the waters, was another rocky escarpment, with a very obvious high tide mark where the rock changed from grey to white. The high tide mark was from the 2022 cyclone Ellie and the floods associated from the storm. Within the waters, we spied some floating crocodilian logs, and watched some cormorants diving for fish and re-emerging many times, before it then sat on a rock with the wings being held out to dry. We could hear all sorts of other birds and see some flit and fly around the trees. Not the most spectacular of gorges, but beautiful none the less. I was a little disappointed as there were no geeks at all in geeky gorge.  No IT department, no pictures from Star Wars, in fact it looked more like a rock formation. Poorly named.  But the cormorant had a long neck and looked somewhat eccentric…

From there we returned to the main road and kept going towards the east. We pulled over to check on a car that had the bonnet up with people inspecting the engine. But they were ok. We also drove past this a very swollen cow lying on its side with legs sticking straight out, a full blown 4 poster …and on the other side of the road, a smashed up Rav 4 car in a ditch. We were able to workout what happened there, cow versus car - nil all. That’s the third car vs cow we’ve seen on this trip. None of the cars survived. Or the cows.  Some spectacular red rocky escarpments and hills appeared out of nowhere and as it was approaching sunset, the colours were pretty awesome. We found a free camp site, the best we have found so far, called Ngumban Cliffs. Not only is it on a cliff top with spectacular views, it has an EV charging station, a dump point for RV’s, a dumpster bin for rubbish, toilets, picnic tables under awnings, and to top it off, not one person came over with a million questions, opinions, or photo requests! We arrived just in time for sunset and got to enjoy another great one, and after dinner we got another great golden moon rising. A lovely day.