drove the Gibb River Road with a friend. Having never driven a 4WD before (and having never needed to) I was a little reticent to get behind the wheel of such a large and powerful car to begin with. The end of the trip had me sulking that the last major river crossing had a bridge built over it! On this trip we took in some truly spectacular scenery, inhaled a lot of dust, washed a lot of dust off by swimming in gorges and waterfall pools, discovered what happens when gas cookers go bad and I learnt what it must feel like to be an ice cube in a cocktail shaker. Yes the Gibb River Road is unsealed and dusty (in the dry, impassable in the wet), which means it has ever present corrugations that you just have to trust are not going to shake your eyeballs out of your head before you hit the magic speed of 75 kph where you stop feeling them. Even with a reserve tank you have to fill up at every petrol station that you pass, because you certainly won't make it anywhere close to the next station if you don't, and this is where the corrugations really come into their own. You know that you have to fill the tank, but the diesel is so shaken up that it has foamed up like washing-up liquid! As you 
put liquid in, bubbles are spilling out...Driving the Gibb River Road we passed many flat tyres, many cheerful backpackers (the most memorable being the 5 French guys traveling in one car and sleeping in 2 two-man tents, spilling out of both whenever we saw them!) and even one very determined, but very sweaty, cyclist! Kudos to him, but I hope he hadn't misread the scale of the map – the Gibb River Road is 626 km long! If you look at maps of the Kimberley you will see a whole lot of nothing apart from rivers. Well these rivers have carved the “nothing” into series of gorges and waterfalls (still spectacular even if some of them weren't flowing during the dry – there are very few time you get the chance to stand in the middle at the top of a massive waterfall and look straight down over the edge!) that provide welcome relief from the heat in the form of cool clear pools. Most of which are crocodile-free!
On this 
journey we visited the Bungle Bungles – how mountain ranges would look if Disney did mountains! They are rounded orange and black striped rocks 200m high - basically they look like a swarm of giant bees have nosedived and become stuck in the ground... We then explored El Questro, taking in El Questro gorge and Zebedee springs – hot springs that form many natural small pools interspersed by palms and ferns – it couldn't have been designed any better if it was a man-made top-end beauty spa! We hiked Emma gorge, where the top pool has two waterfalls flowing into it from such a height that they move with the breeze, and where I realised at the top that I'd forgotten my bikini, so just jumped in fully clothed! Next we chilled out under the stars at 
Ellenbrae homestead, where they have hot showers – provided you remember to light the fire under the boiler the night before! We hightailed it down to Galvans gorge, with a mighty boab overlooking the pool and the falls, and then to Bell gorge where the sound of a didgeridoo echoed around the walls as we swam. Our final stops were Tunnel Creek, a waterway that carves its' way through the mountain , and Windjana gorge, which winds its' way into a wall of sheer cliffs that reminded me of “The Lost World”, and sure enough was populated with crocodiles. Freshwater crocodiles, but still we didn't swim there! Finally we headed down an avenue of boabs and termite mounds back to “civilisation”. Which we didn't find, but we figured that Broome would probably do.
journey we visited the Bungle Bungles – how mountain ranges would look if Disney did mountains! They are rounded orange and black striped rocks 200m high - basically they look like a swarm of giant bees have nosedived and become stuck in the ground... We then explored El Questro, taking in El Questro gorge and Zebedee springs – hot springs that form many natural small pools interspersed by palms and ferns – it couldn't have been designed any better if it was a man-made top-end beauty spa! We hiked Emma gorge, where the top pool has two waterfalls flowing into it from such a height that they move with the breeze, and where I realised at the top that I'd forgotten my bikini, so just jumped in fully clothed! Next we chilled out under the stars at 
Ellenbrae homestead, where they have hot showers – provided you remember to light the fire under the boiler the night before! We hightailed it down to Galvans gorge, with a mighty boab overlooking the pool and the falls, and then to Bell gorge where the sound of a didgeridoo echoed around the walls as we swam. Our final stops were Tunnel Creek, a waterway that carves its' way through the mountain , and Windjana gorge, which winds its' way into a wall of sheer cliffs that reminded me of “The Lost World”, and sure enough was populated with crocodiles. Freshwater crocodiles, but still we didn't swim there! Finally we headed down an avenue of boabs and termite mounds back to “civilisation”. Which we didn't find, but we figured that Broome would probably do.
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