12th August – Purnululu (Bungle Bungles)

We had a good nights sleep at the Bungle Bungles Caravan Park in one of their “Standard” tents; two rooms one with single bed and the other with a double. There was synthetic grass on the floor, no power and shared ablutions. Got away about 8am and headed into the Purnululu NP (Bungle Bungles), It is 52 kms to the Visitor Centre where you pay for camping and park entrance. The road was pretty good as it had been graded recently. Lots of twisties which reduced our speed as there were many blind corners and crests. Also on the road  were a number of water crossings. The first couple were negotiated OK but the third one was too deep for the GS and I managed to drown it about five metres from the end of the crossing. Colin negotiated it successfully on the DR650 but the air intake on the GS was too low. Colin helped me drag it out of the creek to one side and a kind passerby helped us push it up the hill to a more level part of the road so I could start to sort it out. I had to loosen all the crash bars so I could remove the side panels to get at the air-intake snorkel and replace/dry out the foam filters. There was water in the intake channel for the cylinders so Colin dried them out and I remove/disconnected the spark plugs. We then turned the engine over to expel all the water. We sprayed WD40 into the cylinders and turned the engine over a few more times until we were satisfied that only fuel and WD40 were being expelled from the cylinders. We left the plugs out whilst we boiled the billy and brewed a nice cup of tea.

Alan checks his BMW after drowning it in a creek

Check how deep the creek crossing was!

After about fifteen minutes of drying out we replaced the plugs and tried to start the engine … successfully thank goodness. At that time we determined the best way round the deep water for the return journey was to take the right hand edge of the creek on the exposed sand/gravel (we should have gone this way originally).

Further down the road we came upon another deep creek crossing and we tried going bush on the left hand side. This was very hard work and we managed to get stuck on a rather steep rock. After removing all the luggage and laying some smaller rocks in front of the main offender we managed to get the bike up and over to the other side of the creek.   This was all too hard so we looked for a better route for our return journey. We found a track down the left hand side of the road that took us to a hard piece of gravel over the creek bed. This is the way we were going to take on the way back.
After negotiating a couple of other creek crossings we got to the Visitors Centre and were allocated a camping site in the Kurrajong area. We pitched our tents and then headed to the Echidna Chasm.

It was quite a spectacular formation with a huge crack in the main rock structure.

We walked along the crack for quite a while as it got narrower and narrower.

Only slivers of light were visible the deeper we went into the chasm.  Here is Colin with a rock jammed between the sides of the chasm wedged above his head,

At 5pm we headed to a nearby hill to view a spectacular sunset just above our campsite.

Sunset on Echidna Chasm Purnululu