The Gibb River Road (GRR) is one of the iconic 4WD’s routes in Australia. We’d enjoyed it in 2016 so were keen to revisit and explore new parts of it.

Although our time in Kununurra was primarily for shopping, communicating (with internet and phone), laundry, groceries and trip planning, we did manage to visit the town lookout and do a walk. We both quite liked Kununurra (in spite of all the shops closing at noon on Saturday), and think it would be a good place to fly to and then have a week’s holiday there. Its well-positioned for trips to the Bungles, Lake Argyll and Wyndham, so lots to see in the vicinity. We met people from Perth doing just that. By the way the shopping improved on Monday so I managed to buy a dress and we visited some nice aboriginal galleries, and even found a cafe open for lunch at lunchtime (just).

Our first official GRR stop was El Questro, 700,000 acres of vast, diverse and stunningly beautiful terrain including rugged sandstone ranges, broad tidal flats, rainforest pockets, thermal springs, gorges and permanent waterfalls. It is one of Australia’s iconic tourist destinations and caters for high end travellers (the ones that arrive by plane) as well as 4WD adventurers and humble campers like us. For those with an interest in such things, El Questro was recently bought by the G’Day group so is now back in Australian hands.

Manning Gorge was an adventure day! We were advised to start the walk early because of the heat and the crowds. Everywhere is much more crowded than normal, so it was a half hour queue for the barrel to take our stuff across the river. Fortunately for us, we chucked our gear in a barrel and someone else swam it across, so we just had to swim ourselves to the other side.

Next stop was Charnley River Wilderness Camp, which is managed by AWC (Australian Wildlife Conservancy), an independent, nonprofit organisation that works to conserve Australian wildlife and habitats. We visited their sister property previously. Here we learned a lot about their fire management, EcoFire, their scientific research and their partnering with indigenous communities and local stations (ranches). It is very sobering to learn about mammal extinctions in Australia and the damage done daily by feral cats.

That effectively ends our time on the Gibb River Road. This route was 1250 kms, and now we’ve done about 6000 kms since we left home.  We enjoyed the mix of seeing old favorites and exploring new places. Good to see that places were busy – harder for us as tourists needing to plan and book in advance but great for the businesses that have done it tough due to Covid.