Day 18 06/06/2013 Home Valley Station to Drysdale River Station.

Once again we are camped on a property. Increasing tourism, (which I wrote about yesterday), has led to many cattle stations diversifying into accommodation.
We left Home Valley at around 7.30am. The sunrise over the river was lovely and I even spotted a sea eagle soaring around. This region has an abundance of Kapok trees. The tree has bright yellow flowers and the seed pods contain kapok, which the early settlers would have gathered and used to stuff mattresses and pillows.
We saw flocks of tiny green budgerigars and again, many birds of prey. We also saw a dingo slinking off into the bush.....he was pretty skinny.
Despite what I wrote in yesterday's blog about this road becoming busy, we travelled for two and a half hours this morning without seeing another vehicle except for a couple who were stopped by the side of the road with a flat tyre. Naturally we stopped....that's what anyone would do out in the bush; but they indicated that they were ok. The roads out here are pretty unforgiving with respect to tyres, and it pays to buy good ones and to run them at the appropriate pressure. The gravel roads are covered in stones, many of them very sharp, just ready to pierce a tyre which is rock hard full of air. It pays to deflate tyres to lower than usual pressures in this terrain.
After about three hours on the road we saw six vehicles in quick succession coming towards us. We assumed that they were part of a tag-along group........groups travelling together so that help is available if anything should go wrong. At least one vehicle in the group contains an experienced off-road driver.
We had three reasonable river crossings to traverse today....all posed no difficulty. The first was the Durack river......quite a picturesque crossing, where stunted, leaning paperbarks attest to the power of the water that flows through in the wet season. The other two crossings occurred once we had turned off the 'main' road to head north towards the Mitchell Plateau. These were the Gibb River and Plains creek, which is a tributary of the Gibb. Although the road was very corrugated in sections, it was pretty good and we arrived at Drysdale River Station, about 60km north of the Gibb River Road, on the Kalumburu Road, around 11.30 am. If you are intending to travel directly from the East to West Kimberley or v.v., then it is not necessary to take this detour. However if you intend to visit the scenic Mitchell Plateau, as we do, then this is the only way in......and by all accounts once past Drysdale it is a pretty rough track!!
As with Home Valley Station, there are two campgrounds on offer here at Drysdale Station. Once again we opted for the 'bush' camp, which has access to the 'Miners pool' ....a safe swimming hole........or so we were told! It has a population of 'freshies', (freshwater crocodiles), but no salties. Apparently 'freshies' pose no danger to humans......unless deliberately provoked.........although I don't really want to test this theory!
After setting up camp, and seeing other people in the water we had a very refreshing 'dip'. Not a croc in sight!
Camped nearby are some people we met yesterday and so we had a 'happy hour' drink and a chat with them. We were rather concerned by some dark clouds in the sky this afternoon, but they seem to have passed over......hopefully it won't rain!!!