Tag Archives: Landscape

Kimberley Day 8 – King George River

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Tuesday 20 August 2024 – Our final expedition, and also the longest – 2½ hours in a Zodiac.

It’s about 14km from the ship (X marks the spot) to the ultimate destination of the cruise – the King George Falls, which, in full spate, are reportedly magnificent. Dain had, though, set our expectations much lower. Since we’re well through the dry season, the water levels upriver of the falls were, unsurprisingly, low, so we weren’t going to see a massive cataract. Nonetheless, I wondered whether an aerial shot would be possible, even of a low flow, so I asked him whether it might be possible to whizz up the drone for a shot.  As soon as he heard the word “drone”, he simply said, “no”, and offered some kind of weaselly reason like migratory birds. I was expecting the answer no, so it wasn’t a surprise; and launching a drone from a Zodiac might have proved interesting anyway. But I’d have appreciated a more considered and les brusque response, frankly.

Anyhoo…

The ship ran a morning cruise for two groups and an afternoon one for the other two; and our group were last out, just after 2pm.  The first thing one has to do is to get from the ship to the mouth of the river, seen here between two sand spits, since we were just after low tide.

If you look carefully, you can just make out a Zodiac ahead of us as it enters the river proper.

When you enter the river, the scenery is pretty striking, with impressive cliffs on each side.

As ever, the dark patches are cyanobacteria. More on them later.

There’s a lot of geology going on, here.  For example, we passed a formation that showed we’d crossed a fault line, these arise where the Australian tectonic plate cracks under pressure from the neighbouring plates.

Left Bank
Right Bank

There were some amazing lumps of geology just lying around,

and one, nicknamed the “guillotine stone”, is very intriguing,

But it’s actually when you get up close that you get some even more fantastic sights. For example, our driver, Xander, spotted some very pale stone at the foot of a cliff

and took us over for a closer look

at what turns out to be very recently-exposed Wharton Sandstone. This – you remember, don’t you? I did tell you. Yes, I did – is the middle of the five layers of stone that make up the Kimberley, and is easily weathered; so what we were seeing had been uncovered by recent rock falls. These rock falls are catalysed by salt, which is present in the mists above the water; the salt water seeps into cracks in the rocks and evaporates forming salt crystals. The heat of the sun then causes the crystals to expand, putting pressure on the rock and over time this causes the rock to disintegrate. The honeycomb structures left by this salt weathering are called tafoni.

Further along the river we came across some much more weathered Wharton Sandstone, and the colours were extraordinary, as were the honeycomb patterns of the salt-provoked erosion.

Nature and coincidence between them also provided

a map of Africa! [ I don’t see Madagascar though – Ed ]

We did see some wildlife along the way.  There was an Osprey’s nest

though the bird on it is not an Osprey.  We’re pretty sure it’s a Peregrine Falcon.

There was a croc, a big bastard.

And there was a snake.

Xander (to whom congratulations are due for spotting the thing) swore it was some kind of Death Adder, one of the most venomous snakes in Australia (a high bar indeed). We’re not so sure.  Jane reckons it’s a Brown Tree Snake, which is not hugely venomous; our evidence is in the eyes, which show the “cat’s eye” vertical pupil. Apparently, the snake is also called a “cat snake” as a result.

There was a dolphin as well, and it apparently did some fairly serious cavorting, but not while I was watching, of course. A sea eagle flew across at one point as well, but I was busy trying to capture photos of something else. Ho, hum.

By this stage we were approaching our destination – the King George Falls. From a distance, it was a bit difficult to work out what was falls and what was just rock.

There are two falls, left and right, either side of the lumpy bit in the middle. We visited the right-hand one first.

The water flow was so reduced that it was more like condensation running down a wall than an actual flow of water.

but it did show up the rehydrated and therefore blue-green cyanobacteria at its base in very fine fashion.

Then we went to visit the other, left-hand fall.

The flow in this one was more generous – enough that, close up, one got wet from splattered water.

For the record, the falls can look magnificent when there’s enough water coming down the river, i.e. much earlier in the dry season than our visit – but of course then you can’t even get close.

image credit: donsmaps.com

Margie, the Cruise Director from APT, had laid on another surprise party for us at the Falls.

It was a nice thought, but actually dealing with glasses in a moving Zodiac whilst trying to take photos was a bit challenging. However, we manfully forced a glass of fizz down before heading back to the ship.

Although we had a full day left at sea before reaching Darwin, tonight featured a Gala Dinner, after the usual end-of-cruise ritual of introducing all of the crew to the passengers. There were in the order of 160 of us punters, and we were very well served by the 127 crew – hotel, catering, guiding, engineering and steering. Le Lapérouse is a comfortable ship, whose facilities are very well-organised and which has been extremely well run.  The social content surrounding the expeditions might not be to our taste, but it seemed to go down well with the other passengers, so APT have hit their niche pretty well with this cruise.

Overnight, we transit from Western Australia to the Northern Territory. This involves moving our clocks forward, as one would expect.  What I didn’t expect was that the time change was 1½ hours. We have a day at sea tomorrow, and should reach Darwin around 8pm, with the possibility that we could take a stroll round the town if we feel so inclined. Since we have a day or two there anyway, we may or may not take up on that. Come back soon to find out.

 

 

Kimberley Day 7 – Vansittart Bay

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Monday 19 August 2024 – Vansittart. Now, there’s a name to conjure with! Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s one that I had come across before. In the God Old Days when I used to cycle a lot because it was fun, before the appalling Surrey road surfaces put a stop to all that, one of my regular routes led through Windsor. Skirting round the edge, because I wanted to avoid the hill that leads up to the Castle, I actually used Vansittart Road as a way to get back towards the river.

The name Vansittart crops up here and there in British politics, so I don’t know the provenance of the Windsor road’s naming. But the Kimberley one was named after Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in British history (May 1812-December 1822). The bay’s name was conferred, like so many in this region, by Philip Parker King, an early explorer of the Australian and Patagonian coasts.

While I settled down to relax for the day, and try to be well for a putative medical checkup in the evening, Jane went off to the nearby Jar Island. Here she is to tell you about it.

Jar Island was named after the many broken jars found there, once used for storing and transporting trepangs, or sea cucumbers. Fishermen from Makassar in the southern Celebes (the present-day Indonesian province of Sulawesi) visited the northern Australian coast throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, negotiating fishing rights and interacting with the Aborigines. The processed trepang is prized in Chinese cooking for its texture and flavour-enhancing qualities and is used in Chinese medicine; the Makassan trepangers, after collecting and processing trepang in Australia, returned to Makassar to sell the product to Chinese traders.

However our objective on Jar Island was something far older…

The usual Zodiac to shore was followed by a short walk through familiarly rocky terrain,

and the familiar instruction to leave backpacks and hats (this time there was an actual hat-tree),

but the familiarity ended there: the art in this gallery was very different to that we had seen before. Formerly known as “Bradshaws” (after Joseph Bradshaw, who was the first European to see and record such art, in 1891), and now known as Gwion Gwion, these styles of representation are far older than the Wandjina art of our previous excursions – at least 17,000 years old. There is considerable uncertainty about who created them, where they came from,  and what connection there is, if any, to the Aboriginal communities who created the Wandjina art. This has become a political as well as anthropological issue; if the Aboriginal people are not the descendants of the Gwion Gwion artists, this has the potential to undermine native land title claims in the Kimberley. Lengthy discussion of all of this can be found in Wikipedia and a gallery of typical Gwion Gwion art can be found here.

A thought provoking excursion on many levels…

While Jane was away on Jar Island, I was resignedly reading the papers in my cabin, when there was a knock on the door and the ship’s doctor came in. I wonder whether the frustration I’d expressed to Lucille the evening before had provoked the visit; maybe it was just a visit he’d already planned. Anyway, he quickly took my temperature, which was normal (I’d taken some paracetamol), asked about a few other symptoms about which I only had to bend the truth slightly, and declared me fit.

I was no longer a number (cabin 524) – I was a free man!

This meant that I could join the afternoon expedition, which was a visit to a site on the Anjo Peninsula with an unusual geology and even stranger story.

It was another wet landing, on to a beach with some unusual shells littered about.

A short walk up a sand dune dotted with Spinifex grass

led to a very striking landscape,

a salt flat with some rocky outcrops dotted over it – really remarkable sight. The rocks themselves had a great variety of colours, and I could have spent quite some time exploring them,

but this was not what we had come to see. That was just beyond the salt flat.

There, among the scrub and trees, is the wreck of a Douglas C53 Skytrooper, a troop transport version of what we Brits know as the Douglas Dakota.  This one was being used during the second world war as a ferry plane to, well, ferry evacuees. Having done so, on 26th February 1942 it was supposed to fly from Perth to Darwin, with an interim landing at Broome. The pilot set out on the wrong course – wrong by some 20°* – an error only realised when it was too late to get to anywhere with an airfield before the fuel ran out. In casting around for somewhere to land, the pilot realised that Jar Island was too rocky, but then saw the salt flat and did a wheels-up crash landing across it, ending up where it can be seen today.

All aboard – pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, radio engineer and a couple of military telegraphists – survived the crash. So did the radio, so they were able to describe where they landed, even though they didn’t actually know where they were.

Their rescue was remarkable, in that no-one knew they’d set off on the wrong course, so when they failed to turn up in Broome, all the searchers started looking in the wrong places, expecting, not unreasonably, to find crash sites en route to Broome. One person in a searching aircrew, though, recognised the description of the salt flat and so headed for the area, enabling the crew to be rescued. They had survived for a couple of days using pipes from the crashed aircraft to distill drinking water from seawater.

The crashed plane is a fine subject for photography,

and Jane had a private smile when gravely told that this engine, now detached from the wing,

was a Whitt and Pratney.

Nearby were a couple of interesting trees.  One was a paper bark tree,

which is a type of myrtle, apparently; and the other was a sizeable Boab Tree, though not anything like the monsters we saw in Madagascar.

It was surrounded by Pandanus (screw pines); someone had collected some of their pinecone-like fruits and left them in a small pile for people to admire.

Our group filed slowly back across the salt flat; I hung back as much as I could so that I might get a few aeroplane shots without punters in them, which meant that I was practically alone as I trudged strode back towards the re-embarkation point

where, to everyone’s delight, a surprise beach party had been sprung on us!

Champagne and cool jazz made for a fine end to an unusual and interesting excursion.

Tomorrow is a Big Day, in many ways. We’re coming towards the end of the cruise, so we get our passports back, and it’s the last day for any laundry to be done – these things are important, you know. There will also be the final Gala Dinner.

More importantly, it will see the final excursion of the cruise; scenically, we have been promised, outstandingly the best. Since I’m now allowed out, I can’t wait. But you’ll have to, I’m afraid.  Keep your eyes peeled for what I hope will be some really striking images!

 

* The pilot error may well not have been incompetence, but wartime tiredness compounded by bad luck. When plotting and then following a course, a correction has to be applied to compensate for the difference between magnetic north and true north, and this may have been forgotten. Also, the amount of iron ore in the ground can make compasses do strange things, so an error of this magnitude is not necessarily something to be dismissive about.

Camino Finisterre Day 9: Muxía to Quintáns – Normal service resumed

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Friday `10 May 2024 – So, the burning question was: would I feel I could cope with a 10km walk?

Actually, I did.

Our hotel room was very warm, so we didn’t have a particularly comfortable night. Despite that, however, the auguries were good that I was recovering from my digestive meltdown: I was hungry! Breakfast was at 8am, also the time we like to make our bags available for collection, and so we headed down for a leisurely, and in my case, quite sizeable breakfast.

The lack of a way to cool the room was the only significant detraction from my view that this has been the best hotel so far, particularly for being well-organised. The breakfast room was no exception, nicely laid out in a way that allowed for a decent buffet whilst still feeling spacious for those at the tables.

A couple of noteworthy points: firstly, there is a rather shocking picture on the far wall.

It depicts the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Boat, the one at the headland that we saw yesterday, in the 2013 lightning-strike fire that destroyed it.  It’s been rebuilt remarkably well, as we saw yesterday.

Secondly, the background music took a trend that we’d previously noted to an extreme.  The trend is to play cover versions of well-known pop songs, usually in a totally inappropriate style, often sung in English by someone who clearly doesn’t understand the words. We’ve heard a bossa nova version of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, for example. But the hotel absolutely took the biscuit today by playing a smooth, salon-jazz version of Pink Floyd’s Time. It was so incongruous that it took me ages to work out why I vaguely recognised the words but couldn’t place the piece.

For walking, the forecast was great – sunny and about 19°C – so I decided to undertake the walk and we thought that we could have a lesisurely departure, since the distance was short, there was little point in arriving early and we wouldn’t have to worry about overheating.  So I used the time before our departure to sort out my walking poles, since the profile of the day’s walk was somewhat up-and-down.

It’s not too extreme – the ascents are only 100m or so – but the slope is 1 in 10, I was recovering and out of practice at hills; so sticks were the order of the day, for me at least.  I checked mine over to make sure that the little plastic pots, the “ferrules”, that cover the spikes at the bottom of the poles, were still in place.  I’d once carelessly lost one on some ascent or other, and Jane (who, of course, had organised some spares) was grudging in her willingness to hand out replacements.  So I took care today to ensure that I wouldn’t upset the Ferrule Godmother. [One?? Hah! Several!! – Ed]

And so we set off.  It was almost immediately clear that the extra layers we’d donned were going to be unnecessary; there was a cool breeze, but hot sunshine as we bade goodbye to Muxía

and started the first climb.

It led past the Capela de San Roque de Moraime

which didn’t look interesting enough to detain us, and on, through some interesting-looking pines

and past a Fonte which looked like it was also once a lavadoiro,

into a village, Moraime, where we’d notionally planned to have our first coffee stop.  Sadly, La Taberna was Spanish Open, so we didn’t get our coffee. But we did get a chance to look around the monastery there,

which is from the 12th Century and which is a very fine place to pop into. It has an impressive entrance portico

and a splendid interior.

A very significant item of interest there is the frieze which runs all the way along the north wall and which is in remarkably good nick.  Here is a stitch of three photos covering it; it’s not perfect but I hope it gives you an idea.

and here is the official explanation – it represents the seven deadly sins,

from left to right: pride, greed, anger, lust (my personal favourite, ever since Raquel Welch), gluttony, envy and sloth, with death awaiting them on the right.

Our next port of call was Os Muiños, which thinks enough of itself to have erected a Town Name

and which is appealing enough

but, most importantly, had a café which was Open Open, and which served us coffee, juice and beer, all of which were very welcome.

We carried on, along a path with some nice views

which led into woodland, through which we could have seen a beach if it weren’t for the trees in the way.

At about the point where we could see clear across the bay to Camariñas,

and I was busy taking photos of a nice flower arrangement,

we noticed a line of something in the water.

It seemed to stretch a long way,

almost across to where we could just make out the Muxía lighthouse, and we wondered if it was some kind of fish farming frame.  Nothing shows on the satellite picture of Google Earth, but on the other hand the town from which it stretches, Merexo, is home to Stolt Sea Farm, an industrial-scale purveyor of turbot.  Maybe the two are connected?

The countryside around there is very attractive, particularly on a sunny day

and, as we passed the scene above, we wondered if we could catch sight of the bonkersly-large horreo de San Martin that we’d seen on our day trip last Autumn. In the distance, we could see something that might be it.

There.

Yes, that thing.

It’s clearly a big horreo, but we couldn’t see it clearly enough to count the legs. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the one we were looking for, but read on anyway.

The village of San Martiño is home to a substantial church, the Iglesia de San Martiño de Ozón.

As with many of the churches we’ve seen, it has a cemetery around it, and I went to have a look whilst Jane panted quietly in the shade for a bit.

It’s an impressive sight, with quite a contrast between the older memorial markers,

which are decoratively weathered, and the more modern ones

which are identical, but look less interesting because they haven’t weathered at all.

The rest of San Martiño has some very attractive little corners

and the utterly huge 16th-century horreo de San Martiño de Ozon. I posted a photo or two of it last Autumn, but it’s impressive enough to be worth showing again.

It is one of the largest in Galicia, running to 27m in length and having no fewer than 22 pairs of legs. Its large size is because it belonged to the clergy, which imposed a tithe of the crops of the farmers of the parish -10% of the total harvest – and thus they needed a large place to store it all. Apparently, it now “stores” volunteers working in the community. It’s a great photographic subject.

We were by this stage quite close to our destination, the village of Quintáns. The final surprise the walk had for us was this snack vending machine, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I think it’s linked to a nearby albergue. Anyway, this brought us to our pension for the night,

the Plaza, which, despite our arriving at about 2pm, wasn’t going to offer food until 8pm.  Still, it has a bar, and where there’s a bar there’s gin and maybe some crisps or something. The view from our room is rather nice

and we’re hoping for a comfortable night before heading on tomorrow. The forecast is for cooler, cloudier weather, but no rain; hopefully an ideal day for covering the 13 or so kilometres to Dumbria, our next port of call.