3^rd July: Kununurra

Lovely sunrise this morning which Glen was up to see. These changes in time zones do our heads in! We are now 2 hrs behind Eastern Qld. We have free Wifi here at the bar but we are camped close enough to get it in our annex. We will use it!

First thing this morning, we hit the Tourist Information Office in town. We collected lots of info that I didn't already have. (My Hema Atlas and Guide on the Kimberleys is fantastic and I would recommend these publications to anyone planning a trip!) Then we found an IGA and bought fruit & veges. Expensive but necessary! To visit most National Parks in WA, one needs a NP Pass and as that is what visitors do and we plan to, we trotted off to the Parks and Wildlife Dept to buy a pass. (As pensioners or seniors, it cost us $55 instead of $88 a vehicle and as we will visit more than a dozen NP 's at between $12 and $20 each, we thought it was good value for money. It lasts a year and helps to pay for the signs we always read.) 

 

After putting away the groceries, we went driving. (Gail ate her lunch in the car and we skipped eating.) We went to the lookout over the town and surrounding areas, Kelly's Knob and saw Kununurra as the green oasis nestling between ancient red mountains that it is. There are channels from the Ord River Dam and Diversion which water acres and acres of farms. Lake Argyle is huge and we will visit it on Saturday. We drove out of town past mango trees, a grain processing plant and large areas of trees and plants we didn't recognise. We discovered later that there are large areas of Chia plants – the seed that is triple strength Vitamin E and becoming very readily available in all regular groceries. It has gone past being very trendy into normal diets! It is a little bush with purple flowers that we thought was a diffeerent kind of lavender.

But even more extensively were rows and rows of 4 different trees. We guessed and then had confirmed that these are hectares of Indian Sandalwood. Developed by a private company call TFS or Tropical Forestry Services, these huge ares of sandalwood form the basis of a very large export industry. Sandalwood is highly prized and very expensive in India and other SE Asian countries for religious ceremonies and they burn enormous amounts of it. There is a huge illegal trade in it and the stocks are dwindling as “pirates” steal trees and sell the wood. There is a fear that there will be none left in 10 years. So Australia is fast becoming the source of Indian Sandalwood for SE Asian. The way it is grown is interesting. It is a parasitic tree and needs 3 other plants to survive and thus the rows of 4 plants in the fields. As the sandalwood grows, it kills off the other host plants. We visited the factory which treats the heartwood of the sandalwood to extract the oil, exported as well as being used in cosmetics. It is replacing whale oil as a base for perfumes. And of course, the timber is exported as well. Australian Sandalwood is all but disappeared per courtesy of Indian camel drivers and workers over the last century and Indian timber gives a higher yield of oil. Thus Indian Sandalwood is a very valuable product.

We then went on to the Hoochery. An American set up a distillery and he claims that this is the oldest legal still in WA! We had to pay $5 to taste 3 samples. A bit rich! They made rums, a whisky and a couple of liqueurs. Well, I didn't like the rum, the whisky was OK but not as nice as Glenfiddich or even Grants but the chocolate liqueur, Cane Royale,was lovely. A more intense Tia Maria! But we didn't buy any as they were all very expensive. We once again ran into the couple we met in Julia Creek and whose wheels Glen loosened on the road to Katherine. We'll have dinner on Saturday night.

Our last stop was at the Hidden Valley NP or Mirima. We walked and climbed through rounded beehive rocks and canyons, a small version of the Bungle Bungles we are told. All harden sedimentary rocks 350 million years old, the result of silt washing down from the Argyle Ranges and then exposed and eroded when the ice-caps melted the several times they did, it is a fascinating place. As well, there are plaques naming various trees and bushes and explaining how the aborigines used them. Very interesting!

 Sunset at our park.