Purnululu and the way to Broome

1/8/2015

On the drive to Turkey Creek Roadhouse, I had a close encounter with a wild horse that decided that it had to cross the road before me. As I saw it from the distance I lifted the foot off the pedal and slowed down a lot, but still had to break hard from about 60kmh down to almost zero to avoid a collision.

Helispirit has got a base next to the roadhouse. As I was keen to do the helicopter flight, I waited around for about an hour to find another person in order to be able to take the 45 minutes Purnululu (Bungles Bungles) flight. It was amazing to see this wonderful national park from a birds perspective and additionally go over several other mountain ranges on the way to Purnululu and see many gorges. As this was my first helicopter flight, I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was mostly a lot smoother than I would have thought.

Afterwards I had still more than 3 hours of driving to do before I pulled in at Larrawa Nature Stay. While driving I was listening to many episodes of Bulletproof Radio. Great guest and some interesting bio-hacks that I need to try myself.

Larrawa is a beautiful small camp site next to a farm. Took some photos of the sunset and surprisingly met a person that used to work for Rio Tinto and was an inspector for the final check on my machine in Bulgaria, about 4 years ago. What a coincidence! Got invited for a BBQ by his wife and spent a lovely evening chatting with them and enjoying the remoteness of this area.

Distance traveled: 520km

2/8/2015

Arriving on the Westcoast - Broome

Another really long day behind the wheel, but I'm happy that I arrived in Broome mid afternoon today. Only stopped in Fitzroy Crossing quickly – looking for a coffee shop and fuel up, but was unsuccessful in regards to the coffee, and then at a roadhouse about 150km before Broome. Finally some coffee!

Broome was a lot busier than I expected – most caravan parks were full or overflowing. I'm spending the night at the overflow of the overflow caravan park. My neighbors, a couple from Victoria, are very nice and I had a lengthy chat with them before heading to the markets and town beach for the famous stairway to the moon, which can only be seen at full moon.

I bought a tasty, yet unhealthy, woodfired pizza and sat down to secure a spot, almost 2 hours before the moon was supposed to rise. Due to the wind, it was a bit cooler than expected and unfortunately I packed the wrong lenses for this interesting event. Anyway, it was great being there and seeing it, but I'm not really happy with the photos .

Distance traveled: 561km