A brutal landscape blessed with the most pristine places to get wet

My favourite way to travel is on an authentic adventure, far from infrastructure, people, crowded tours and folksy loudspeaker commentary.

Lake Argyle - water water everywhere,

However, I’m about to do the opposite.

Myself and a couple of dozen tourists sheep our way out of a coach that has delivered us from our accommodation at the Lake Argyle Resort in the East Kimberley to a boat ramp.

I grimace in this baking Kimberley sun, burning down on a parched landscape. I’m bracing myself for several hours of sweating it out on a packed boat, on a man-made lake. But one of my fellow travellers did this sunset cruise a few years earlier and she vows it is one of the best things she’s ever done. But right now, I’m sceptical.

Waterhole, El Questro Wilderness Park.

The first half of the cruise takes us far across the 1000-square-kilometre reservoir Lake Argyle until we stop to feed some ravenous fish. Then the bow of the boat nudges the shoreline of one of the roughly 70 islands created when the Ord River was flooded in the early 1970s. Here we feed a group of wallabies that now live on this island. As the bite of the afternoon sun begins to diminish we make a course towards the centre of the lake and the boat stops. So far, so good– just your regular afternoon on a big boat on a big lake.

But it is at this moment that this adventure changes gear.

Everyone on the boat, craving the blessed relief of getting into the water – even if it is 50 metres deep and populated by freshwater crocodiles and giant catfish – strips off to their swimmers. We are each promised a maximum of two alcoholic drinks and pool noodles to use for buoyancy before leaping into the water. Normally, I would never use a pool noodle because I’m a strong swimmer but even I cannot tread water and keep a wine glass dry without some kind of flotation assistance.

Floating clumsily all around me are passengers with pool noodles between their legs, carefully balancing glasses of sparkling wine and cans of beer, navigating and propelling themselves one-handed in the middle of this vast water body that stretches as far as we can see in every direction. Suddenly Lake Argyle has become Australia’s biggest swimming pool and we are having a bizarre yet spectacular pool party.

It takes two pool noodles stuffed between my legs to keep me stable enough and high enough in the water to hold a drink and paddle one-handed at the same time. I see my three friends about 30 metres away and make my way tentatively towards them (note it’s hard to make a straight line holding a wine above water, balancing on pool noodles and using one hand for propulsion).

Drinking sparkling wine together in the middle of Lake Argyle is weird and magnificent and cool and refreshing. By the time we clamber back on board it is approaching dusk and, all around, the classic mesa-like escarpments, covered in boulders and spinifex, that make this landscape so iconic are glowing rust red and golden, while the geography is casting immense shadows across the water.

Rugged beauty with more places to swim than you can poke a stick at.

As soon as everyone is back on board, the boat steams back towards the Lake Argyle Resort. It’s been a fun afternoon and a surprisingly quirky travel adventure and I believe the pleasure has peaked. But almost as soon as we are under way, Lake Argyle flips the switch to a majestic lightshow.

The sunset is like watching an aurora reflected in the water. Away from the centre of the reservoir, where a light breeze dapples the surface, and once in the lee of the escarpment, the lake has completely glassed out and is a perfect mirror for the slow-motion light show in the sky. And it’s not just a few minutes of dazzling colours while the sun drops below the mountain range rising from the western side of the lake. This is a grand final of sunsets, a half-hour of suspenseful penalty shoot outs, leaving every person on the boat silent with anticipation and respect for what this supersized landscape is capable of conjuring with just four ingredients – sky, rock, water and ever-diminishing light.

Calling it a sunset cruise is a ridiculous understatement. It’s a natural phenomena that, on its own, is worth crossing a continent to see. By the time the boat arrives back at its berth, twilight is wrapping up and a stunning full moon is rising above the lake to the east. My friend was right: it is one of the best things I’ve ever done.

El Questro Homestead.

Again, in the late afternoon heat, we leave the Lake Argyle Resort, only this time in a helicopter and make our way high above the reservoir towards a far island and land on a deserted beach that feels about as far from humanity as you can get.

Our pilot, Nick Fulton, from Helispirit, prepares a luxury picnic from an Esky while the other passengers and I swim among the stags of drowned trees on the edge of the lake. As dusk approaches we board the helicopter, circumnavigate this huge island and then fly to the centre of the lake. Nick tells us over the intercom that we are about to pass over the sunset cruise boat. Below, we can see the travellers in the water, specks floating on their noodles. He then flies us over the massive rubble wall that holds this reservoir back and, Durack House, the original homestead that was moved to escape the rising water as Lake Argyle filled.

It’s not all about the waterholes … El Questro horse-riding.

This sunset is different to the one from the boat – a blast of golden, showy bling from horizon to horizon silhouetting the archipelago of the lake’s islands.

“You are getting that pure spirit of the Kimberley magic,” Nick tells me. “You go find a little spot to park up, like we did today. There’s no one around and you just see those beautiful orange colours ... there’s no better place to be flying.

“I’m a sucker for water so throw in the typical desert colours you’d see at the Bungles Bungles and the green of the vegetation and add a bit of water and it’s a match made in heaven for me.”

After Lake Argyle, our next stop is El Questro Station a 700,000-hectare wilderness cattle station and outback tourist mecca dissected by the Pentecost River, 110 kilometres west of Kununurra. On our first evening we clamber our four-wheel drive to the summit of a range, not far from the station’s main accommodation area and watch another dusk, awed by our third staggering Kimberley sunset in a row.

El Questro is one of those handful of Australian destinations that are code words for adventure – the Cape, Oodnadatta Track, the Tarkine.

And it doesn’t disappoint. El Questro is perhaps most famous for its luxury homestead where prices start at almost $2000 a night and head to $3500. But it also caters for adventurers on a budget with unpowered camping options for about $50 a night and multiple glamping and cabin options in between.

For the adventurous there are self-guided experiences and rangers who will accompany you to visit the park’s wonders. The station offers everything from horse-riding treks to helicopter picnics. And the culmination of almost every adventure is the obligatory crystal-clear water hole.

Giant boabs as big as small buildings.

On our second day at El Questro we leave our accommodation just after dawn with ranger Todd Smith for a hike up the namesake El Questro Gorge. But even getting to the start of the walk is an adventure, with two significant deep river crossings, one more than 100 metres wide, even though it is nearing the end of the dry season. We pass boab trees the size of small buildings and eventually reach the end of vehicular access under a towering escarpment of King Leopold sandstone and the entrance to the gorge.

Once we start walking, the arid spinifex and grassland gives way to a remnant Gondwanan rainforest of ferns, pandanus and towering palms. This is a lush, dark and wet world of splendid tree frogs, tree snakes and sooty grunter fish swimming in the gin-clear pools. It is also an ancient landscape – the cliffs are billions of years old and everywhere are fragments of fossilised ripples on the face of stones and boulders in the bed of the gorge from a time when this was an inland sea.

Swimming holes that are worth a trek.

Even in the early morning it is hot and Ranger Todd promises the reward of a swim once we reach our destination – known prosaically as the Halfway Pool.

After clambering over rocks for an hour we reach the promised spring-fed waterhole and spend half an hour cooling down before heading back downstream to make our way to another famous Kimberley swimming spot – the thermal Zebedee Springs.

Here the water is a permanent 28 to 30 degrees under the umbrella-like canopy of ferns and palms. Soaking for nearly an hour I think to myself that the Kimberley, like the 50 words the Inuit have for different types of snow, needs its own suite of words to describe all the countless ways it offers to bathe and swim.

In the brutal landscape and climate of far north-west Western Australia, nothing pleasurable comes easy, which is what makes the glorious moments so exquisite. And that is exactly how the man who runs El Questro, Geoff Trewin, likes it.

Gorge view - El Questro Homestead.

“Our goal here is to make it safe not easy,” Trewin says. “People come here for the challenge. For adventurers in eastern Australia the pinnacle road trip is to get to the top of Cape York. In Western Australia it’s El Questro. They come for the challenging walks and the hard-to- reach waterfalls. It’s a challenge to even get here and even the name El Questro has a mystique.”

On my last day, just before leaving El Questro, I take a final swim in the Pentecost River. It is time to say goodbye to this vast wilderness of red rock and clear water, this brutal, arid landscape replete with an oversupply of that simplest human luxury – pristine places to get wet.

The writer travelled as a guest of G’day Group, the owners of Discovery Parks and El Questro.

THE DETAILS

THE VISIT
Lake Argyle Resort offers a range of activities including the sunset cruise and swim.
See discoveryholidayparks.com.au
Helicopter flights are operated by Helispirit. See helispirit.com.au

STAY
Lake Argyle Resort is just under an hour’s drive from Kununurra. Accommodation ranges from camping to luxury cabin-style suites. See discoveryholidayparks.com.au

El Questro is 110 kilometres from Kununurra and also offers a wide range of accommodation.
See elquestro.com.au

MORE
australiasnorthwest.com/plan/visitor-centres-travel-specialists/kimberley