Kunnunura - Wednesday 27th AugustKunnunuraCar Kilometres: 173,427Distance Travelled: 673km

Total Distance Travelled: 5176km

We arrive in Kunnanura, hot and bothered but glad to stop.Our campsite, the Hidden Valley, is lovely, with a large pool and powered sites big enough for the tent, car and us to laze around on with room to spare.We set up, super quickly now we're experts, and book a scenic flight over the Purnululu National Park, containing the Bungle Bungle range, for 6.30am tomorrow morning.

After reading about the Bungle Bungles in Bill Bryson's Australia book (can't remember what it's called, but it has Australia as the ice cream in a cone on the front), I've been desperate to see them, and was disappointed that they could only be reached by fancy tours or having a four wheel drive.However, having missed out on a few other things (notably the Wolfe Creek (eek!) meteor crater), we decided that we could justify the $265 each expense for the experience, and booked with the most simple of the tours, run by Alligator Airways.

We get up at 4.30am, and are surprised (although probably not really), to find that it's warm and humid already.We are picked up in a minibus from a stop outside the site, where we had been stationed with about eight other people in their early to mid twenties.We'd thought they were dressed a bit scruffily for a touristy outing, and soon discovered that they were all waiting for their various lifts from farms to go for a long day's hot and dusty fruit picking... once again we are thankful for our months of comfy desk jockeying in Perth.Our minibus driver also looks to be in his early twenties, and we are amused by his pilot's costume... until we realise that he is the pilot, and that on reaching the airstrip he's managed to forget one of the passengers... what if he forgets to press an important button on the flight?

He comes across as very knowledgeable and authoritative though, as he guides us through the safety drill for the small eight-seater Cessna that we will shortly be boarding... our confidence returns and we clamber on.Our seats are cramped but comfy enough, and although half of my window is obscured by some plane part or another, we both get an awesome enough view.We have snapped on headphones - partly to keep out the plane noises, and partly to enable us to hear both the pilot and the jingly-jangly recorded commentary that says the same as what the pilot's just said, but in a more flowery way.

The take off is smooth, and we are soon flying at about 500ft above the Ord River, it's dam, and the huge geometrically shaped irrigation fields that flow from it.Next comes the man-made Lake Argyle, Australia's second largest reservoir - holding about 18 times more water than Sydney Harbour, which is a whopper in its own right.We are told that there are thousands of crocs in the water, but aside from a rather suspicious looking 'log' in one of the creeks, we don't see any... that'll have to wait until Darwin.We pass over two large cattle stations - each as big as a hundred farms back home - that are separated by a river bed.Due to the sheer size and scale of the land here, the deal is that any cattle crossing into the other's territory is either handed back, or the money handed over once they are sold.Amusingly, there is also a finders-keepers policy on any who have been born and grown up out in the wilds - an entirely possible situation, given the vast area.

Next up, we spot the earthy beehive-like ochre and black striped domes of the Bungle Bungles range.They have been moulded by rainfall over millions of years, and the stripes are caused by the differences in clay content and porosity of the layers.Bungle-Bungle is thought to be a mis-spelling of the word 'Bundle Bundle', a type of common grass in the language of the local Kija indigenous people.The Bungles have only been known about by the public for a relatively short time (1987ish), as the area is so remote and inaccessible that only local aborigines and pastoralists had ever seen them.

We feel very privileged to be seeing what we are seeing - and also glad that we didn't choose a walking tour instead, as we're sure that it wouldn't do the range justice.The soft lumpy domes are beautiful, and definitely worth the trip.

As a bit of a bonus excursion, we are to land at the Bungles airstrip to drop off one of the passengers and to pick up three more; one tourist and two off-duty workers from the Bungles wilderness walking tour that we had skipped.I was especially glad of the opportunity for a breather and leg-stretch, as I'd begun to get a bit airsick in the last few minutes... it disappears pretty quickly on the ground, but I'm dismayed to feel it come back again as soon as we're back in the air.However, being pretty seasoned travellers by now I reckon I can avoid it - I alternate a minute or two of looking out of the window for a last look at the Bungles with a few minutes' of closing my eyes, sipping water and gingerly sucking on tic-tacs.It seems to work for now, and I recover enough not to miss anything as we fly over the enormous Argyle diamond mine, the source of a third of the world's diamonds.The trucks pootling about on the surface look like small white tonkas, but I soon realise that they are about ten times the size of a normal vehicle, specially made mine-trucks with tyres as big as houses... apart from customer service (meow), they don't do things by halves down here!

On the way back to Kunnunura we also fly over some spectacular ridges, gorges, ranges and general landscape.One highlight are some hills that are so dense as to look like a huge grass-covered duvet with loads of people's knees, arms and legs sticking up underneath it, with it folded around them.This explanation probably doesn't do anything that we saw much justice, but hopefully the pictures will help to tell the story too.

My stomach seems to be behaving ok, until we turn three sharpish corners to line up with the runway... this has me reaching for the 'souvenir bag', although I manage to survive until we land - and quickly recover.Despite being ok for most of the journey, Dave is also looking a bit green around the gills by the time we land, and we both have a long lie down once we get back to the tent, despite the heat, followed by a reviving swim in the lovely site pool.

The following day, we decide to have a look around the town, visiting an aboriginal art gallery and plucking up the courage to go into an art centre where local aborigines are painting some artwork, ready for the Perth Show.I'd been a bit shy, thinking that they wouldn't want us to intrude, but we find out that its quite the opposite - they chat to us about their work and tell us that they won't be going to the show, but seeing it on TV at home instead.Dave buys a carved boab-nut in the gallery shop next door, and I can't help teasing him about where he's going to put it at home - since he's always so tidy and organised, whereas I'm a clutterbug.Ah well, dif'rent strokes and all that...