El Questro and Frankie J

Left our van at Kununurra in the C/van Park, stocked up and headed off to “camp” in tents at El Questro Station at the start of the Gibb River Road. It’s a million acre cattle station and wilderness park. Great place! Got to Emma Gorge first, which Mark has vivid memories of from his first trip around. A very different place (20) years later, a resort now stands where they camped.

He also remembers it was a pretty special place, and it was. A 1.6km mainly rock scramble track to get in, along and through a creek, in amongst palms, waist high spear grass and big rocks, with the spectacular reddy/gold walls of the gorge either side. The older two and I set off in front (common occurance with Charlie stopping to look at EVERY rock, leaf etc on the way, then the shoulder rides..he has picked up the pace since the beginning though!) We came across some people that had stopped to take a pic of a brown snake right where we were about to walk, and had seen a black one a bit further along the track!! The kids and I made lots of noise along the way after that.

The gorge was spectacular, only a trickle of a waterfall, but the sides nearly enclosed all around us with 85m high sides. Took an extremely icy dip in the water and was watching Samuel swim for awhile thinking isn’t he doing well for so long in the cold. It wasn’t til he got out and didn’t stop shivering for a very long time that we realised he could’ve been borderline hypothermic (oops!)

Set up our tents for a night at El Questro Station, then wandered over to the restaurant/bar area. They were just setting up an outdoor projector for a kid’s movie, so we settled back with our blankets and choccie while Mark checked out the communal campfire. A minute later he was back smiling. Ella and Samuel went to get reacquainted with...Frankie J Holden! (and yes Tathra Xmas Camping Crew, he remembered “The Pizza Song”*, in fact he started to sing it..then asked Mark if he wanted to take a photo of him with the kids!)

·         We stayed at Frankie J’s Caravan Park in Tathra last xmas hols and Ella, Ally & Ben wrote a song about our woodfired pizza night, which all the kids later performed with Frankie J, it was titled “The Pizza Song”