5.10.09

Well, once again my expectations have been proven wrong. I stand by what I said originally in that Derby is a bit of a dump but despite this we’ve had a good time. Before I elaborate though, we managed to see the Grand Final yesterday which was a great game, with a disappointing result but very pleased to see the mighty Eels go down fighting. I have only rant, we were robbed at the end! Not being a sore loser but it’s annoying when a ref’s decision robbed the game of a cracker finish, well done Melbourne, they deserved the win.

Ok, that’s out of my system I’ll get down to business. We’ve been in Derby four nights now and had a pretty good time. There’s nowhere to swim here except the local pool which is about 20m long but 2.55m deep at the deep end with a little water fun park off to the side which is very cosmopolitan. We spent all of Saturday arvo there which was fun; I nearly broke my skull and compressed my spine while chasing Lachlan through this little set of steel arched fountains. There was four arches about chest height on me and they squirt little spray jets at the ground, well while chasing Lachlan through the set I stood up after the third arch instead of the fourth one and near killed myself when I head-butted the last one and a fair sprint. Another funny little episode at the pool involved our little entertainer Zali, playing with a plastic shopping bag, I watched her closely to make sure it didn’t end up on head. After five minutes –

“Dad, can I take my swimmers off and put my leggings on and this over the top without my skirt?”

I turned to look and she’d made two leg holes in the bottom of the bag and proceeded to put it on, legs through the holes and arms through the handles, she looked like a little white Oompa Loompa. Belinda and I started to laugh and Zali looked down at herself and cracked up, very funny.

Our friends Darryl and Sarah, an English couple we met at Saddle Creek the night before we hit WA, arrived here on Saturday afternoon and set up camp next door to us. We’ve caught up with them several times since we first met but we’ve spent the last four nights with them now and got to know them very well. They are a very fun, really easy going couple who the kids just love and they’ve really made the whole Derby experience fun.
The tides here are huge, they’re like four metres each time and so the jetty here is really high. We rode out there on Saturday night for the sunset, cheese and biscuits only the tide was racing out with an unfenced 30ft drop to the water. We got some beautiful shots but were nervous about losing a child the whole time, especially as there were some drunken idiots actually jumping off into crocodile inhabited waters racing out very fast. After that we had to ride 2km home in the dark.

Sunday we all relaxed around the camp for the morning until we thought we better drag ourselves off to the two famous sites of Derby, the Boab Prison Tree and the Southern hemisphere’s longest cattle trough. I don’t know the story of the trough, only that it’s 120m long and 100+yrs old. The Prison Tree on the other hand I know a little, back in the 1800’s the settlers had their farms and the towns were being established and the laws came in. Stupidly these poor Aboriginal nomads were somehow supposed to know the rules and obviously didn’t. Now it’s very dry and hot up here and the local natives would run short of food in the dry season so would kill a settlers cow or two, course then the police would come and arrest them and march them for days out to the chain gangs building roads etc. This is where the Prison Tree comes in, all the old Boab trees are hollow, this ones about as big around as a big garden shed with a little opening, while they were force marching the natives across country they would stop at the tree for the night and jam the natives in.
That’s Derby, after the Jetty, Cattle Trough and Prison Tree there’s no more so it was back to the park for the footy.

Today we hired a Landcruiser and drove out to Tunnel Creek and Widjana Gorge, awesome. Our Cruiser turned the corrugates to perfect highway, or at least that’s what I assumed and the kids were so excited to have a 4x4. Tunnel Ck is a 1.7km tunnel with a creek running through, surprisingly, you need a torch and you can walk the length of the tunnel, without a ranger. It was really cool, a big bat colony lives halfway through, there’s fish in the creek and all the spectacular limestone formations that all limestone caves have. It was really nice to see it without a ranger, nothing against rangers but just about everything has a ranger attached these days.

Windjana was stinking hot. Very spectacular but stinking hot. We spent some time there but most of it sitting in the shade by the creek, the cliffs are spectacular in Windjana and we counted 17 crocodiles in the main pool, the cool thing, they were freshies so we had a cautious dip in the creek.

Once we’d arrived back in Derby we were welcomed by the good news that our car has a cracked sump and could cost up to $1200 to fix, might have to work a few weeks in Broome. Sarah and Darryl took a trip to Bell Gorge and had their bulbar break so we have a welder coming to look at both cars tomorrow. Not to be deterred from having some fun we took the cruiser out onto the mud flats last thing today, all six of us went for a burn, me driving. I set a course for the mangroves, about 5km away and off we went, about 3km into it we hit the soft mud and down we sunk, it was a few close moments but we churned our way out, took some photos and raced to a large Boab Tree for photos of it with the sunset. Yep, Derby’s been fun, but I’ll be glad to hit Broome and the next stage of the adventure.