Because Glen and I can’t/won’t stay in Perth for more than two seconds, we flew up to Kununurra in the State’s far north for a 12- day holiday with Narelle.

Originally Ravinder kicked off the idea for the trip by suggesting we drive the Gibb River Road, but this eventually morphed into a different trip.

And, unfortunately, not long before leaving, Ravinder had to cancel so we lost our instigator but continued on.

We left Perth on Saturday morning, landing in Kununurra around midday. Narelle picked up the 4WD, and we set off…

…to Coles. Yep, first stop: supplies!

Coles on Saturday in Kununurra was the place to be. Glen and I ran around getting stuff for lunch, and tonic for our gin. I think we took longer to pay for our stuff than to actually get it.

From there it was a quick stop to get some ice then we were off.

Stopping not far out of town at a dam that had some concrete tables and chairs, surrounded by boabs.

Overriding impression of Kununurra: boabs. Big ones, small ones, fruiting ones, everywhere.

The other thing: birds of prey. Lots of them. I don’t know which species but there were a lot of them. Pretty cool.

Lunch had, Narelle drove us to El Questro: Emma Gorge, where we were staying for two nights all in the same small room. As Narelle said, it was probably a good thing that we had this accommodation at the start of the trip, rather than towards the end. We might have been ready to kill each other by then.

We checked in, off loaded our stuff in our tent thing (which thankfully had its own bathroom), then set off for our first walk/hike.

The accommodation is at the start of the hike through Emma Gorge, a roughly 3km walk through a gradually narrowing gorge, that has two pools at its end.

The walk was fairly easy, though not as quick as we thought it would be. The estimate was two hours with no swim (return) but we did it in 1.5 hours with a swim.

There was one sheltered rock pool that you could swim in before continuing on slightly rougher terrain to get to the next rock pool, which is fed by a trickling waterfall from the top down sheer rock cliffs.

We saw multiple people coming back who each said we would have the whole place to ourselves. Apart from the last guy, they were all liars haha. But when we did finally reach the pool, we had it to ourselves for about fifteen minutes.

The water was so cold and very deep. We’d been told that there were warm patches near “a fissure in the rock” so Narelle and I swam around the whole place to try to find it. (Glen stayed in the shallows.)

We swam through warmer patches, but they weren’t nearly as hot as we’d been led to believe, but they were welcome regardless.

After a full lap, we got out and slowly got dressed. Then a guy and a girl arrived and went for a swim, the guy stripping off entirely to get in. The view was nice haha.

We walked back to camp, the light fading early, what with us being closer to the Northern Territory border than to Perth.

For dinner, we drove to El Questro Station which includes going through our first water crossing and engaging the 4WD function. (We got a tutorial from one of the staff at Emma Gorge when we checked in.) It was fun, plunging into ankle-deep water at night. So butch. Narelle did a great job.

Dinner was “pub food” with an Outback twist. I had a crocodile tail burger (which tasted like chicken). Glen had steak, Narelle had Chardonnay battered barramundi and chips.

We didn’t stay very long. I was falling asleep at the table and had a headache so was very glad to not hang around.

Narelle got us home safely and we went in bed by 8:15, totally wiped out. A successful first day!

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