Wednesday 26th June 2013 – Fitzroy Crossing to Windjana Gorge

Off to Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge today.  After backtracking 40 km towards Derby we turned north and were back on gravel.  Let some air out of the tyres and continued on to Tunnel Creek where K&M and I walked through the tunnel eroded under the Napier Range.  Jill thought it would be too claustrophobic so choose to chat with the aboriginals who were running tours through the tunnel instead.  The tunnel was fascinating.  Incredible coloured rock at the beginning (looks like marble).  The tunnel is about 700m long with a gap in the middle where the roof has caved in at some stage in ancient history.  As you would expect it is very dark inside and at times wading through water up to your thighs was necessary.  The creek meanders through the tunnel so the wading was necessary to get across the creek occasionally.  Didn’t see a lot of wildlife apart from a few bats and a cute frog (Bilingual Froglet), certainly no freshwater crocodiles that some people had talked about.

Next stop was at the Lillimilura Police Station ruins where the story of Jandamarra began when he turned on and killed his policeman friend at join his people in a guerrilla war against the white settlers which end three years later when he was shot near Tunnel Creek.

About lunch time we pulled into the camping area at Windjana Gorge (flushing toilets and hot (solar) showers – quite a surprise).  Rain is forecast so we put up the big awning.  It’s very hot at the moment – 34 degrees (hard to believe it’s winter) so we waited until about 4pmn to go and have a look at the first part of the gorge.  We’ll do the full 7km return walk in the morning.  What an amazing spot this is.  Beautiful rock and lots of freshwater crocodiles.  As part of the Devonian Barrier Reef there are quite a few fossil imprints of marine creatures in the rock.  One fossil of a nautiloid was particularly impressive.

After dinner we decided to take the spotlight and go back to the gorge to do some croc spotting.  As we got near the spot where we had seen them during the afternoon we could see lots of red eyes and quite a few crocs.  There was then this enormous noise which sounded like thousands of waterbirds taking off.  Turned out that it was the crocs launching themselves off the bank into the water.  When we got to the spot there were hundreds of red eyes with crocs behind the eyes floating around in the water.  What an experience!!!!

On the way back we also encountered quite a few little bats in crevices in the gorge wall.  Later spoke to the ranger about them and she bought us some books which enabled us to identify them as Northern Cave Bats – very cute.