Best Gorges Yet
Trip Start
Aug 14, 2008
1
7
12
Trip End
Ongoing
Karijini, Australia
Monday, September 1, 2008
Tom Price is a crap hole, very rough seeming and with easily the poorest standard of roads and all that we'd seen yet. It's a mining town which I suppose doesn't lend itself to a classy existence. The town was founded in the 1960's I think and is named after an American employee of some big mining company who convinced the government to allow mining in the area. To demonstrate the historical disregard for the Aboriginal all native names in the area were ignored, even to the extent of calling the biggest mountain hereabouts Mount Nameless! Aborigines have lived here for over 50,000 years and have names for everything but still the European settlers called it Mount Nameless!
We were a little worried about the unsealed roads in the park after our experience of Kalbarri but they were much better here so we were pretty happy that we didn't do the $150 4wd tour! Instead of crawling along at less than 20kph as in Kalbarri we were able to cruise at 60-80kph. Thank god for that, the last time was a bit of a nightmare. The visitor centre has some great information about the area and the history since European settlement. The Aborigines got a seriously raw deal....but that's not so surprising really. At first some of them were shepherds...but then fences were introduced. Then they became Dingo hunters...but that work soon ran out. Many of them were stockmen on the stations here but were paid very little, often just clothes and basic rations. Even that fell through in the 1960s when the courts ordered equal pay with white people, at which point the station owners said they couldn't afford to have them and laid most of them off!
Anyway they now own this land again and run it in conjunction with the government as a National Park. The park is very spectacular, with gorges that far outstrip those of Kalbarri in depth and grandeur. Again we did plenty of walking, but the rating system for advising of the difficulty and duration of the walks was way off. They were saying that 2km would take over 2 hours! Crazy really and seemed to be a worst case scenario, like for a 1 legged, asthmatic blind man or something. I don't know. Anyway in the course of our walking we saw lots of beautiful waterholes, waterfalls and scenery. Dales Gorge was a decent start although we didn't swim in the freezing circular pool. Life's too short for that!
Later we visited Oxer's Lookout and decided to find Handrail Pool which is rated level 5! Okay it was a little tougher to get to than earlier ones but still fine. That little trek was cool enough as we had to wade some parts and climb around on the rocks too. By the time we reached the pool it was getting pretty dark in the gorge so it was time to go before real darkness set in and made things dangerous.
So, tired after another long day we set off for another hour of driving to shorten the next day. We reached a 24 camping site and, in the dark drove up, parking randomly and settling in for the night. It was with delight that we realized we'd stopped in a beautiful place, surrounded by hills and canyons with great views all round. It was so nice to sit outside and enjoy a morning cup of tea overlooking the countryside.
