The East Kimberleys

From the end of the Gibb we travelled up to Wyndham just for a look around, we got a few things for lunch from the IGA and travelled up to the five rivers lookout. The five rivers lookout has view of the Pentecost, Ord, King, Durack and Chamberlain rivers all flowing into the Cambridge Gulf, the banks of which are fertile with black enriched soil. After lunch we continued onto Kunanurra where we checked into some luxury, a real bed in a little self contained cabin, before we explored the town. Tanya dragged Ben in to two jewellery shops specialising in the local Argyle diamonds which come in a great variety of shades most notably and expensively the rare pink diamonds, not quite as rare as the ones Tanya liked most; the green diamonds that take their colour from the uranium that  may surround them. Recently there was a story in the news about a super beyond rare diamond that had been found, classified as a purplish red, the first one of its kind and said to fetch a nice price over 10 million, but that’s all hush hush.  We dropped in at coles to get a couple of things most notably fresh bread to have with leftover stew and an early night under a fan in a real bed.

The next day we did the tourist thing looking at the zebra rock galleries, sandalwood gallery and the Hoochery, the rum distillery of the Kimberleys. We went on the Hoochery tour and sampled a few of the rums and liqueurs before having lunch and buying a sample to take home. Afterwards we drove down to Lake Argyle and it was unfortunately dark by the time we got down there but we booked onto a sunset tour for the next day. In the morning we decided to go exploring the area and went down to the dam wall and to the lookouts, the dam wall structure itself is quite fascinating.

Engineering Ingenuity;  The Ord River Dam and Lake Argyle have no spillway instead it has 4 overflows away from the dam wall so that the structure would not be compromised (of which only 1 overflow has ever been used). The dam has a flexible core made of clay as it sits on a fault line that stretches down from Darwin, the clay stays wet from the water collecting on the other side and thus stays flexible and waterproof. It is 95m tall, 315m wide and 305m deep at the widest point, two 4.42m pipes release water back into the Ord river thus providing the irrigation scheme for the farms down the river. Thirty mega-watts of hydro-power is made from the release of water of which even in the heat of summer when everyone has air-conditioning and beer fridges running full time only half gets used. The Argyle diamond mine leases the power produced from the scheme and massive powerlines take it overland to the mine which you can just see beyond the edge of the lake over the curvature of the Earth. The Dam only cost 22 million dollars to build back in the 70’s which even then wasn’t a lot to build such a big structure and most of the rock was sourced from the 4^th overflow right beside the dam. While we visited the dam was at 92% capacity which is equal to over 20 Sydney harbours in volume, of that each year 1m of water off the top of the lake is controlled release into the Ord River and another 2.5m off the top is lost to evaporation. That 1m that is controlled release could supply Perth with its current water usage for 5 years. In the 2010-2011 wet season the overflow had so much water running through it per HOUR it could supply the whole of the 22million people in Australia with the average per person usage of 300L for an entire day. That was just the overflow. When the lake is full it can store up to 52 Sydney harbours of fresh water, and that wet season it got up to the equivalent of 44 Sydney harbours. Also at the height of that wet season the lake rose 1.6m in 24hours, and was 9m over the height of spillway 1 with almost another 2m before it would peak over spillway 2. The freshwater crocodiles can get up to 4m long as it is such a vast amount of water, and there was 35 000 at last count. Lake Argyle is also classed as open water with swells of up to 2.5m in the middle of the lake when there are high winds. From the middle of the lake you cannot see the widest points at the same time as it is so wide the curvature of the earth obscures them. One last item, when they were excavating the rock to build the dam wall they had only 2 blasts the seconds of which was the largest single blast in the southern hemisphere and could be felt as far away as Sydney on seismograph machines.

We learnt most of that on the sunset cruise that afternoon, after trying to go for a swim in the 16.5 degree pool before lunch. The bus down to the boat departed just after 2pm and it was a lovely open boat to make the most of the views. The captain took us to see as many of the far reaches as possible, except of course the south which was a good 40 to 50kms south, where we could see the mountains around the Argyle diamond mine over the curvature of the earth. We saw Euros and Crocodiles as well and enjoyed refreshments at sunset, Ben decided to go for a swim with some of the other brave souls, apparently it wasn’t as bad as the caravan park’s pool but I was too busy taking lots of photos of the sunset.

From Lake Argyle we said goodbye to Western Australia and welcomed ourselves back into the arms of the Northern Territory.



P.S. Photos to emerge sometime soon, sorry for the hold up on blogs :)