WA - Marble Bar and Carawine Gorge

The drive to Marble Bar was a strange experience really. The landscape was largely bare and looked almost like a Lowry painting of the bush would look - matchstalk trees rather than people would the same feeling of desolation although this is a Martian landscape and not one of Lowry's industrial townscapes.

We eventually arrived at the "Hottest Town in Australia" - so called because it had temperatures of over 100F (37.8C) for 160 consecutive days back in 1923/24. It isn't a very impressive town though and even the Iron Clad hotel (the one real iconic location in the town) doesn't look too flash - you'd walk straight past it unless you were looking for the sign.

We called in there for lunch and were treated to a frosty bitch of a barmaid who pointedly ignored us in favour of serving the locals, even when that local pointed me out and said that I was there first. Piss poor I call it.

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The marble bar, after which the town is named, is a rock bar that goes across the nearby river. It is actually jasper and not marble, but it looks good though

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We drove back through town and went to buy fuel only to find that the servo (which is also the only shop in town) is closed (for lunch) between 12pm and 3pm. It doesn't open on Saturday at all and only on Sunday morning. Fortunately we had enough fuel on board to get to Carawine Gorge and back anyway so that wasn't a real drama for us.

The drive in to the gorge, after 150km of bitumen, is a rough dirt track that has a few creek crossings and lots of places where the track has been washed away and rutted. This didn't present any great problem for us apart from slowing us down to a crawl in a few places. At one point, faced with a steep but badly rutted incline, I even chose to drop it into low range to make it easier to crawl up. Fun though, as long as it doesn't go on for too long. The 13km track in took us about 50 minutes to negotiate. If anyone reading this chooses to visit then take my advice and when you reach the fork in the road on the track in (this is right next to the station's air strip) take the right fork if you are towing anything. The left fork will take you a little further upstream in the gorge but the land there is surfaced with some very soft, Whaley rock rubble and it would be very easy to get bogged.

Carawine Gorge is a river course with a wide shale/sand/earth floodplain on one side with some steep gorge walls on the other side. It was awesome at first sight.

Once in we checked out the obvious camping spots and chose one that faced the water but was sheltered by trees and reasonably level. 

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We set up and organised ourselves and then relaxed with a beer to watch the huge flocks of corellas swooping around as they looked for a place to roost for the night. Noisy buggers I can tell you, but they are a pretty sight.

The next day we took a walk up and down the gorge. Normally this place would have crystal clear, blue water and be a great place to fish and swim, but ater all the rain that the cyclone dumped the water is now a murky brown colour. Still, it is a pretty place with the sun on it and while the fishing may be off it seems that the herons and the pelicans can find enough to keep them interested.

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Camp fire tonight and damper made in the camp oven. This turned out to be the best damper I have made. Cheesy topping on a light damper. Yum.

We enjoyed being there so much that we decided to stay another night despite the fact that we will then hit Marble Bar for fuel on a sorry day. Ah well. If we need to hang around for another night then it wouldn't be the end of the world.