Savannah Way Information

Savannah Way

AM at Keep River National Park, 430km southwest of Darwin as the jabiru flies, and the birds are singing me from sleep, dragging me awake from the warm cocoon of my swag.
A lone boab tree stands in the scrub off the Savannah Way in the Gregory National Park, Kimberley region of Western Australia /Michael Gebicki They begin about a half-hour before sunrise, while the sky is still ink and the stars are fading to a memory. There is a butcherbird, the diva of the bush, working in arpeggio, and galahs, raucous and sharp-edged, and soft twitterings from birds that call pensively and wait for a response, and then a dingo joins in, a crooning that makes you wonder at first what kind of a throat is making that sound, but instinctively you know. It's moments like this that make the Savannah Way special.
The longest touring route in the country, the Savannah Way stretches clear across the top of Australia – 3699km from Cairns to Broome. Although the route was announced with much fanfare in mid-2004, apart from the signs that announce the name there is nothing new about it. The roads that make up the Savannah Way are all well-trod trails. Stitching them together is a branding exercise, but a useful one since it turns the spotlight on some of the natural wonders of the Top End, including 15 national parks and four World Heritage areas (more than one-quarter of Australia's total).
Our route is the western half of the drive – Katherine to Broome, 1555km by the shortest route, except that nobody but the road trains takes the shortest route. Take the main road and you'll see only dust and scrub, which is mostly what we see until we get to Gregory National Park, a half-day's drive southwest of Katherine. Stretching south from Timber Creek, Gregory National Park is our first real taste of boab country, named after the pot-bellied, wild-limbed tree that is the distinctive feature of the Kimberley landscape. It also brings confirmation that a four-wheel drive is required if you want to see the best that the Savannah Way has to offer.
The first 40km into the park you could do in a sedan, but 1km before the campground at Limestone Gorge the track becomes a boulder-strewn riverbed that jars and jolts and hurls us around in the seats. It's worth it. The campsite sits among pandanus palms on the floor of a green valley, between rough, red hills where boab trees are silhouetted against the sky. Nearby is a huge billabong, clear enough to see baby barramundi swimming along the bottom.
Two days later, at 8am, we are strapped into an aircraft bearing the snappy insignia of Alligator Airways and heading out across Lake Argyle towards the Bungle Bungles, Australia's latest contribution to the World Heritage list and one of the supreme wonders of the outback. Erupting from the flat desert landscape, these ancient, weathered sandstone domes are striped with alternate bands of orange silica and black lichen, clumped together like a hive full of bees, heads down in the honeycomb. The Bungle Bungles cry out for exploration at ground level, but it is only from the air that you get a sense of their sheer scale – and the final part of the 250km drive from Kununurra is a bone-shaker.
Although the local Kija Aborigines knew about the Bungle Bungles for thousands of years under the name of Purnululu sandstone country, they were practically unknown to the wider world until the 1980s. Only in a place such as the Kimberley, you might think, could a mountain range of 450sqkm (almost the size of Singapore) escape the attention of the tourism industry for so long.
Alligator Airways is a paragon in a sector of the tourism industry that often comes up short. The aircraft it uses for these trips, a GA-8 Airvan made by the Victorian manufacturer Gippsland Aeronautics, is the sort of aircraft to make Australian hearts swell with pride. There's an overhead wing, decent ventilation and beside each seat is a convex window almost as big as the page you are looking at. For sightseeing and photography, nothing apart from a helicopter does a better job.
Alligator Airways also provides an illuminating taped commentary, and if you pay attention you will prove your value as a Trivial Pursuit partner the next time you are posed a question about the storage capacity of Lake Argyle or the daily output of the Argyle diamond mine.
The Savannah Way amplifies the love-hate relationship between the outsider and the bush. South of Kununurra, a hillside dotted with green pillows of spinifex lances my ankles when I climb it but at the top there's a big termite mound that glows molten red in the dying light against a sea of dun hills.
Dust fidgets into everything – nose, ears, boots, cameras – but the billabong at Limestone Gorge is a taste of heaven. For hours at a stretch the road slurs beneath our wheels and disappears in a distant black dot, swallowed up in a droning void. But then a dust devil hoovers ash from the fire-blackened scrub, sending a furious black funnel dancing across the landscape, and we're wide awake and chattering.
The Aboriginal presence is everywhere. Aborigines make up about half the 30,000 permanent residents of the Kimberley and this is one of the wellsprings of contemporary Aboriginal art, the home of Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie and Jimmy Pike. Recognition is a death knell for an Aboriginal artist. All are now dead, but their work has inspired a new generation and the art centres in the towns showcase their work.
While you won't find an original Madigan Thomas among the racks of paintings at Turkey Creek these days, at least you'll have a chance to snap up the next big name before their Manhattan retrospective sends the prices heading into the stratosphere.
So scarce is water in this region that its presence creates miracles. Close to the western extremity of the Kimberley, Geikie Gorge is part of the Kimberley's ancient reef system that has been cut by the mighty Fitzroy River. Although the walls are predominantly a palette of rusty colours caused by iron oxides, for almost 20m above the normal river level the rocks are bleached white by the raging floodwaters that course through the gorge in the wet season.
At sunset, when we take the ranger-guided cruise through the gorge, the colours are surreal, haemorrhaging in a violent ooze across the cliff face.
The gorge also tells a remarkable story of adaptation. When the salty waters of the Indian Ocean retreated, several stranded marine species adapted to their new freshwater environment. This is one of the few places on the planet where freshwater barramundi, mussels, stingrays and prawns are found.
Next, the Buccaneer Archipelago is a revelation. At Derby we board a Cessna of Golden Eagle Airlines and head north across huge mudflats woven with branching creeks, then across a series of sandstone hills that creep into the sea to become a mosaic of islands. The archipelago is one of Australia's lost corners – a thousand palmy islands set in tropical seas – yet despite their white sandy beaches and the coral that freckles their bays, these islands are far from inviting.
The tide can rise by 12m, creating whirlpools and amazing phenomena such as the horizontal waterfall in Talbot Bay, caused when the water flows through a narrow slot between two islands. There's no fresh water and the sea is filled with species higher up the food chain than you are, which will not hesitate to make a meal of you if you so much as dip a toe in the water.
Beyond Derby, under a cloud-veined blue sky, we speed west to Broome and our Savannah Way journey is over. Throughout the trip we have been fantasising about this moment, but when we get to our Broome hotel the driveway is clogged with tour buses, the bossy doormen hustle us through the unloading, and my luggage ends up in someone else's room. For the first time in a week, I sleep in a bed, between rustling clean sheets, but I am woken the next morning not by a butcherbird but by a porter barging in at 5am to collect bags. Wrong room.
Michael Gebicki was a guest of the Northern Territory Tourist Commission and Tourism Western Australia. www.savannahway.com.au

The Australian

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