Kimberley WA tour proves the easy way out
If ever there were a place to rid you of an aversion to organised tours, this remote part of Western Australia is it.
There’s something innately disconcerting about voluntarily swimming through icy-cold, crocodile-infested waters towards the pitch-black interior of a cave. Yet that is the situation in which my wife and I find ourselves at Tunnel Creek, in the middle of Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region.
With our children clinging to our backs like slippery possums, we swim into the darkness towards an unseen sandbank that our indefatigable pig-tailed tour guide Brooke promises is only 10 or so metres away.
Sure enough, after a few seconds of nervous paddling, the sandbank materialises beneath our feet. Our headlamps catch the reflection of the eyes of Tunnel Creek’s resident freshwater crocodiles, who are well fed from the large colony of ghost bats that inhabits the cave.
Much like exploring the Kimberley in Western Australia itself, Tunnel Creek is difficult, at times uncomfortable but utterly worth the effort. In this instance, our rewards are the spectacular chambers further within the tunnel, where sunlight spills in through collapsed roof sections to illuminate the cave’s stalactites. It is the highlight of the final day of our five-day tour from Broome to the Bungle Bungles and back again with local operator Kimberley Wild Expeditions. The decision to join an organised tour is completely outside our normal approach to travel. We typically relish the chance to plot out our own adventures, and had considered organised tours the domain of randy teenagers and doddery pensioners.
That aversion is especially strong when it comes to our own backyard of WA, and it seems we are not alone. While Covid has prompted West Australians to travel around our state in extraordinary numbers these past 20 months, we have been hopeless at extending that new-found interest to the tours and experiences that typically rely on visitors from elsewhere. Indeed, of the 13 people on our tour, our family of four is the only one born and bred in the west.
If ever there were a place to alter our opinion, however, the Kimberley in Western Australia is it. The region is so remote, the distances so vast, the conditions so challenging, the logistics of travelling through such a large, under-serviced area in such a narrow time frame so confronting, that jumping on board with Kimberley Wild makes sense. One of my biggest concerns before the trip was the amount of time we would spend aboard the 4WD tour bus, given the roughly 1900km round trip required about six hours of driving most days. But such is the heat of the Kimberley Western Australia, particularly towards the end of the dry season, that the bus and its air conditioning becomes a sanctuary.
Then there is the drive from the main highway into the World Heritage-listed Purnululu National Park and the Bungle Bungles along the Spring Creek Track. It’s a brutal, bone-rattling, butt-numbing, tyre-shredding drive featuring multiple river crossings and switchbacks. The heavily corrugated track is only 64km long but takes more than two hours to complete. It would test the skills of a suburban SUV driver like me.
Again, the discomfort of the Spring Creek Track proves to be absolutely worth it. Kimberley Wild’s own permanent camp at Purnululu features basic accommodation but has a deck with spectacular views of the range’s western flank, which glows as the sun sets each night. Similarly, our treks through the heat and over at-times tricky terrain into the Bungle Bungles lead us into the extraordinary Cathedral Gorge and Echidna Chasm – two towering structures carved into the sandstone by wind and water over 360 million years.
There will be many people who instantly recoil at the prospect of spending thousands of dollars to sleep in unpowered tents for four nights. You will get dusty. You will see spiders. This tour is not for those who measure the success of a holiday by the thread count of their sheets or the fluffiness of their hotel bathrobes. But as a means of getting to see the best of one of Australia’s most beautiful if at times inhospitable regions, with the logistic complications taken care of, it is hard to top.
And when one of our bus’s tyres explodes not long after we complete our trip back out of the Bungle Bungles, the all-hands-on-deck approach to changing it in sapping 42C heat is yet another reminder of why we’re better off not doing this alone.
In the know
Kimberley Wild Expeditions’ five-day Broome to the Bungle Bungles tour runs from May to September; from $1895 a person, twin-share.
This article was originally published in November 2021 and has since been updated.
