We finally tore ourselves away from beautiful, fascinating Kununurra. A short hop down the Great Northern Highway brought us to Turkey Creek which is now called Warmun after a local Aborigine tribe. Just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

The caravan park at Turkey Creek is part of the Road House. On arrival around midday we were surprised to find it already quite full. By dusk it was overflowing. The word 'overflowing' reminds me that there is only one W.C. for us males, plus two showers and a urinal. Just thought I should mention that. Might be fun in the morning especially since it doesn't flush properly. The caravans are packed in like sardines; we don't even have room to extend our awning, though to be truthful I don't care. Our neighbours on both sides are very nice and we're only here for three days. The water pressure varies between poor and none existent.

The temperature is appreciably lower than at Kununurra and we haven't needed the air conditioner at all. Consequently we all have our windows wide open. The only problem with that is that nobody can make a sound without the neighbours hearing it, due to the close proximity of the 'vans. I just hope our neighbours sleep very soundly. Our caravan has been known to reverberate substantially in the wee small hours, somewhere in the region of 4.5 on the Richter Scale. And that's only the snoring.

We had booked a road tour into the Bungle Bungle Range, though perhaps 'road' is the wrong word to use. There are also helicopter flights into the Bungles from here but, much as we'd both love to go, the price is more than we're prepared to pay.

As it transpired, our journey into the Bungles was postponed because I came down with a man-cold. What is a man-cold? In some ways it resembles a woman-cold but is many times more severe. You may have noticed that women are able to continue working and performing their normal duties when suffering from a cold. This is irrefutable evidence that the suffering is inconsequential. A man-cold, on the other hand, requires bed rest and much attention and coddling. Unfortunately, because women are unable to experience the suffering and misery of a man-cold, they believe it is no worse than a woman-cold and thus pour scorn upon the superior sex. A cross we have to bear, fellas, so let's do it with stoicism.

The Bungle Bungle Range
Our tour bus departed from the Turkey Creek Roadhouse at around 05:30 for the three hour drive into the Bungles. It would be another half hour before the sun rose and it was quite chilly. Apart from ourselves there was just one other couple on the tour.

The four wheel drive bus took us south on the Great Northern Highway for about fifty five kilometres and then turned down a dirt road for a further fifty three kilometres. When the bus wasn't stirring up bulldust into choking clouds behind us it was crawling down steep creek banks and struggling through flowing water over unseen rocks on creek beds.

As the picture above shows, we stopped for a welcome drink and a biscuit along the way.

Matthew's responsibility for us ended on arrival at the East Kimberley Tours visitor centre in the Purnululu (pronounced perna-lulu) National Park. He introduced us to our guide for the day . . .

. . . a terrific personality called Wendy.

Wendy proved to be full of fun and very knowledgeable about the Bungles and the flora and fauna in the Purnululu Park. She was also an exceptionally good driver, both on and off the bitumen. By the end of the day we were all very fond of her.

Wendy drove us first to Echidna Chasm where we walked through a narrow passage between towering, vertical cliffs. Oddly the cliffs were not solid rock but a very hard conglomerate consisting of rocks up to about the size of a tennis ball bonded in a 'cement' which, I think, included silica. I should listen harder.

Due to the nature of the terrain, Pam opted to guard the bus while the rest of us walked to, and through, the Echidna Chasm.

What causes the alternate orange and dark horizontal stripes? Well, if you think back 360 millions years, a large sedimentary rock mass was being laid down by 'braided rivers', remember? Due to changing environmental circumstances, through some periods there was clay in the sediment and in others, little or none. As more sediment was laid down the lower layers were put under increasing pressure and eventually turned into sandstone. Now just bear with me, I know all this stuff is very basic.

Later, massive changes occurred which uplifted all this sandstone to form mountain ranges. Fractures occurred in the sandstone as it was pushed up, so naturally when everything settled down and wind and water continued their process of erosion, channels were worn where the fractures had occurred, dividing up the mass of rock into fragments. As erosion continued the beehive shapes began to form.

Okay, okay, I'm getting there. So now we have beehive shaped mountains forming which have alternating layers of high clay content and low clay content. High clay content retains water, low clay content is porous and the water drains away.

Now comes the interesting part. An organism called cyanobacteria is very comfortable living on the surface of moist sandstone, but it can't get a foothold on the low clay sandstone because it drains and dries out too quickly. Okay so far? Not really rocket science, is it?

Now we have horizontal stripes of cyanobacteria growing between layers of dry sandstone. The cyanobacteria appears dark grey or black. The exposed surface of the dry sandstone oxidises to appear orange. So, there you have the stripes, but they're only skin deep. Cut into either and you'd find the near-white colour of the sandstone just below the surface. That's how you can spot a recent lightning strike, the resulting scar is white.