Sunday, July 13, 2003

Helen Daniels's painting retreat

After the long long journey, we arrived in Kununurra and checked in at a nice hostel we'd booked. Kununurra is a few hundred kms from The Bungle Bungles - huge weird rock formations. We wanted to see them, but the ground-based trips took two or three days - we didn't have that long. So it was we splashed out for a flight over them in a tiny (six-man) plane. I've never been in such a small plane, and the Bungle Bungles were really something special so I'm glad we did it. Typically for this vast country these rock formations were only really made known to the Aussies in the 1980s. Amazing that such things can exist unnoticed for so long.

When I flew to the Grand Canyon in a little plane in 1995 my mum and sister were both ill due to the turbulence. Anne and I took travel sickness tablets to try to ward off this, and thankfully we weren't ill.

In the afternoon we both fell asleep (thanks, I suspect, to the travel sickness tablets) and later went to watch the sunset at Kelly's Knob look out. Kununurra is a small town, built to service a nearby dam when it was built in the sixties. There's not a lot else to do here!

Saturday we relaxed in the very very hot sun, by the pool. What a nice way to spend the morning. It was too hot by midday, so we retreated to the room, then went to a nearby national park to look at some more rock formations.

Today, Sunday, we are hanging about waiting to get the bus to Broome, on the west coast. We're not looking forward to this journey - our first over night bus journey. We leave here near 5pm and don't arrive in Broome until 8am on Monday morning - yikes. I'll have to put up with fidget-bum Anne that whole time!