Day 16 04/06/2013 Lake Argyle to Kununurra.
Up early again.....we are not used to WA time yet! Headed into the town of Kununurra, only a 70 km drive. Kununurra is an Aboriginal word meaning ' meeting of the waters'. It is in Kununurra where two large rivers meet... The Ord and the Bow. It is said to be the youngest town in Australia since it was only established around the time of the proposal to dam the Ord river. The area around Kununurra is pastoral land and there used to be two very large cattle stations.....Ivanhoe and Argyle. The town itself now sits on what used to be part of the Ivanhoe station, and of course since the dam was built, Lake Argyle now covers a very large area which used to be Argyle land. The Argyle station was owned by the Durack family......a large family (originally from Ireland.... and then from Queensland) who ran cattle. Before the lake was flooded, the original Argyle Homestead built by the Duracks was dismantled and re-built, and now houses a museum. The reason it was dismantled is because otherwise it would now be under water somewhere in the middle of Lake Argyle! We checked into a campground, set up, did some laundry and shopping and had an early lunch. Then a bus picked us up to take us back to Lake Argyle, around the back of the dam wall and onto a boat which took us along the Ord River back to Kununurra, by sundown. This was an excellent cruise, quite different from yesterday's. we saw more crocodiles, but also plenty of bird life....lots of different types of cormorants; herons; masked plovers; dotterels; a white-bellied sea eagle and a jabiru( black-necked stork), to name a few.
We saw beautifully rugged scenery which glowed red as the sun became lower in the sky and the day ended with a typical outback sunset.
One amusing story to tell is that on our cruise was a couple who we had seen( but not spoken to) at the Dunmarra roadhouse a few nights ago. We spoke to them today and they said, yes, they remembered us......but then they asked us where we were from, and when we told them, said they remembered chatting to us at a caravan park in Broken Hill several years ago when we were on our way to cross the Simpson Desert. What an amazing coincidence!!!
Back to our (very ordinary) campsite for dinner and blog writing!
We are hitting the Gibb River Road tomorrow and may be out of mobile range for ten days!