Day 8 of Broome to Bowral

For the first time in a week, nobody had to get on a bike.

No 4 am porridge. No searching the highway for two little flashing red lights. No second breakfast on the side of the road.

Bob and Tom had ridden into Kununurra the day before, and we’d deliberately allowed ourselves two days here.

A proper rest.

Well, for Bob and Jenny perhaps.

Tom and I went sightseeing.

Glad Tom’s relaxing

We started exploring Kununurra and found Ivanhoe Crossing.

After days of watching Tom ride hundreds and hundreds of kilometres across the Kimberley, apparently his idea of a rest day was to come sightseeing with me.

Ivanhoe Crossing was beautiful.

Water rushed across the old concrete causeway, and a family was fishing from it when we arrived.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this crossing had been here in one form or another since around 1930. It was once an important part of the old Darwin to Wyndham Beef Road, before being raised and rebuilt in the early 1950s.

And they built part of it out of old petrol drums.

One hundred and four of them.

They cut the bottoms out, welded the drums together and used them as pipes beneath the roadway so the Ord River could flow through, apparently saving about £6,000 worth of concrete in the process.

The Ord itself has changed since then too. The development of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme turned this into a year-round flowing river, which is why today water continually moves across the crossing.

The kids were having a great time. Their mum was keeping a close eye on them, making sure they didn’t get too close to the edge while still letting them enjoy themselves.

They were growing up learning how to be safe in this environment.

I hoped they caught something.

Barramundi are caught around Ivanhoe Crossing.

So are sightings of something considerably larger.

Saltwater crocodiles inhabit this part of the Ord River, which is why swimming here is very definitely not recommended.

I still hadn’t seen one.

Exploring Kununurra

We kept driving.

On our travels we came across an enormous old gantry crane.

And I mean enormous.

The sign identified it as The Old Gantry Crane, 1963–2010, but standing underneath it gave you a much better idea of its scale than any sign could.

It’s huge.

Then we found a road climbing up a steep hill.

So naturally, up we went.

From the top we could look out across the landscape surrounding Kununurra.

And this was much more like the country I’d imagined before I got here.

What I hadn’t expected was all the water we’d discovered since arriving in Kununurra.

And eventually…

I found a crocodile.

Unfortunately, it was painted on a wall.

Still counts.

Back to civilisation

That evening we found Kelly’s Bar & Grill for dinner.

It had a lovely atmosphere, and there were boabs everywhere in the artwork and decorations.

They clearly loved their boab trees.

So do I.

After days of highways, roadhouses, camp kitchens and roadside meals, Jenny was thoroughly enjoying being back in civilisation.

There was even a T-shirt involved.

And more of the metal artwork I’d been noticing throughout the Kimberley. It seemed to be everywhere up here.

We even managed something quite rare.

A photo of all four of us.

Bob, Jenny, Tom and me, sitting around the table together.

I’m usually the person behind the camera, so there aren’t many photos from this trip with me actually in them.

This one matters.

Paul

And there was Paul.

We’d met him the previous day after parking the vans. The holiday park had called him when we needed someone to drive us around Kununurra.

Now he’d been our driver for two days.

Before we left, we got a photo of Tom, Jenny, Bob and Paul together.

Another person who had briefly become part of the journey before we all moved on again.

Our neighbour

Bob, Jenny and Tom were staying in a cabin.

I’d set my van up on the other side, and one of our neighbours was a remote-area nurse.

When she learnt what Bob and Tom were doing and why we were travelling across Australia, she told us she had cared for many patients with MND.

Even on a day when nobody was riding, somehow MND kept finding its way back into the story.

The infamous plumbing

Then there was Jenny’s hire van.

The bloody plumbing.

Water was supposed to come out on the left-hand side of the red valve underneath the van.

Instead, it was gushing out before the valve.

The toilet had worked approximately twice during the entire trip, and they’d given up bothering with the shower in the van.

We had two plumbers come and look at it while on this trip, one in Kununurra and one in Mt Isa.

They fixed it.

Or at least…

we all thought they fixed it.

Tomorrow we’d leave Kununurra and head towards Timber Creek.

And somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the plumbing would fail again.

From the road Originally posted during the journey on 29 June 2026. View my original Facebook post →