Day 96

Wednesday 10th June 2015, overcast, warm 30.

Wyndham

We’re woken at sun up by the cheeky corellas, we should be used to this by now but we’re so close to the Northern Territory border that the sun rises at 5:50am and sets at 5:00pm whereas if we were another 100kms East it would be an hour and a half later. It feels like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.

 This little park boasts that it has the largest boab tree in captivity ie it is within the park, anyway it is big and they reckon that it’s about 2000 years old and it looks it.

The Five Rivers Lookout is one of the best and worth the detour to Wyndham. On three sides you can see the Cambridge Gulf and the five great Kimberley rivers emptying into it. The King, Pentecost, Durack, Forrest and Ord rivers. It also gives you an understanding of the salt pans and mangrove creeks. 

The one commercial fisherman sells fish from his home in Wyndham and we have a hankering for a prawn lunch. We walk through the cyclone wire gate, across the dirt yard, between the mangrove tree, dog and an old bath tub on the right and the front end loader and dead car body on top of an orange shipping container on our left into the workshop. We step around the trail bike in bits on the floor and there’s the fisho’s missus packing up fish for the freezer. “Welcome to the processing works” she says. And this front yard is a pretty good description of most in town. But they seem a happy lot. We had earlier run into a bunch of caravanners that we call ‘Penny’s Crew’ who we’ve been tailing since Tom Price. They thought Wyndham had been abandoned!

The Rusty Shed cafe in the port is advertising Barra and Chips Nite. Thus, we find ourselves sitting under the gum trees on a large timber deck listening to a guy called Brad Martin play guitar and his mate Beno on harmonica. The evening is balmy and the place is almost full. A few caravanners and a lot of locals under the stars beside a rusty iron fence. The guitarist, a shock of red hair (only red hair is described as a shock), a bushranger beard and bare feet. There’s a cheeky French waitress who flits about the tables and the Barra is beaut and from our Fisho mate of course. And Penny thought this town was abandoned! One just has to look a little closer sometimes.

Wyndham doesn’t get newspapers. When the service was stopped they were told that they just don’t buy enough. Over dinner I hear a local declare “I watched the News tonight.” Another replied “Oh I gave up watching TV a long time ago.” I guess what happens in the rest of the world or even in Perth, bears little relevance to the folks out here especially when you live in a tin bungalow in the tropics 3390kms away and the ads on TV are for a business in the South West of the state declaring that “there is a store near you.” Yeah right.

Accom: $36.00

Travelling Kms: 0

Note: People look at us strangely when we say we loved our stay in Wyndham but it is one of those small towns that really does deserve a close look. Our mates The Prado’s visited just after us and they found a wonderful collection of Aboriginal art at the pub. It is a unique town, don’t be fooled by first impressions.