Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2002

Thirty-five degrees in the shade. Giant green frogs in the toilets. A rope swing across a warm, dark plunge pool. Bushcamping under a meteor shower. Kangaroo tail curry for dinner. Swimming in a crocodile-infested river. Moments-notice road closures in the start of the Wet. Toe-biting catfish. The tiger-striped, beehive domes of the Bungle Bungles. Sweat-soaked days and lightning-show nights. Spaghetti Bolognese in the outback. Ridgy-didge Aussie ockers. Western Australia to the Northern Territory. Broome to Darwin.

I quietly dripped in the dense tropical heat as I waited for the big, rumbling 4WD from West Coast Explorer to pick me up early on a Sunday morning. Joining driver Henry, nine seasoned travellers who had come up from Perth and eight other newbies, I set off into the outback for an eight-day camping tour.

Not far from Broome, Henry slammed on the brakes and leapt out of the truck carrying a cloth. He had spotted a frill-necked lizard by the roadside and chased it up a tree before finally capturing it. This remarkable creature looked like a relic from the dinosaur age and it hissed and flared its neck frill at us while Henry held it firmly by the tail. The mean, aggressive stance was all show and abruptly vanished as soon as Henry put the lizard back on the ground. Its running action can only be described as a mince. It reared up on its bowed hind legs, pressed its arms to its sides and, with its nose pointed haughtily in the air, waddled away into the bush.

We stopped at a portly boab tree used to house Aboriginal prisoners in transit to Derby, then left the relative comfort of the highway for the Gibb River Road. It is a dirt track of legend, only navigable for part of the year, and gives access to the stony mysteries of the Kimberley region.

This part of Australia is famous for its cavernous, red sandstone gorges and the Kimberley is peppered with them. We stopped in at Tunnel Creek first, an underground river through a limestone tube populated by pungent bats. It leads to a cave full of sparkling formations and a murky, yet welcome, swimming hole.

We camped the first night at Windjana Gorge and Henry took us down to the creek which stank of rotting fish and other dead things. We sat while the sun sank wondering in what insanity he had brought us to this smelly, unremarkable place. We soon found out. When the sun hit the horizon, tens of thousands of fruit bats poured out of the trees, whooshing over our heads on leathery wings towards the candy stripes of the sunset. They swooped down to drink from the creek and were feverishly snapped at by lurking freshwater crocodiles before swirling in an unending flock out of the gorge to find food.

Rumbling on down the Gibb, we took in the remains of a police outpost where an Aboriginal tracker had turned on his employers and joined the fight against white settlers. We set off in the full heat of the day for Bell Creek Gorge, apparently the most beautiful along the road. It was only a short walk but we were drenched in sweat when we reached a waterfall and a cave that reeked of bat dung. I swam across to the other side of the plunge pool to get away from the smell of guano and we all dozed on the rocks like so many corpulent sealions.

Climbing in and out of more steep, sun-raked gorges, we rewarded ourselves with refreshing swims in the rivers that had carved them. We were supposed to travel the whole of the Gibb River Road but only made it as far as the store at the Aboriginal community of Imintji.

It was late November and the start of the Wet season. A curling piece of fax paper taped to the store window told us that the rest of the road had been shut, forcing us to double back to the rough-as-guts outback town of Fitzroy Crossing. We kept our fingers crossed that the road into the Bungle Bungles, the highlight of the trip, would not be shut as well.

The gods of the road were smiling on us and the 60 km-long, stomach-churning track into Purnululu National Park was still open. Twenty-four hours later and we would have been too late. The Bungle Bungle massif came to public attention in 1982, being known before to only a handful of station owners, scientists and Aboriginals. It is remarkable for its soft sandstone domes, coated in alternate stripes of orange iron oxide and black cyanobacteria. These ramble on for thousands of hectares, interspersed with deep fissures like Echidna Chasm and the booming cave of Cathedral Gorge.

Tourism is deliberately kept to a minimum in the massif and I felt like I was walking into another time. I half-expected Bo Derek to run from between the domes in false eyelashes and a buffalo-fur bikini, being chased by a badly-animated T. rex. Once at Kununurra, I chose to take a plane flight over the massif which looked like a landscape from another planet. There is nothing else like it on Earth.

We crossed from Western Australia into the Northern Territory on Saturday and reset our watches. A sign at the border reads "Adjust your clocks forward 1½ hours". With judicious covering of certain letters it soon read a much cruder "Adjust your cocks for 1½ hours".

Our final bushcamp was at the peaceful fishing spot of Big Horse Creek. This was a definite no-swim zone as the harmless freshwater crocs were replaced by their dangerous saltwater cousins here on the Victoria River. The rain that was threatened that night never fell but we left Big Horse Creek under a heavy sky. At Katherine, my mobile phone beeped into life for the first time since leaving Broome. Our arrival in Darwin was preceded by a swim at Edith Falls. As we paddled in the dark pool, a bright white fork of lightning split the sky and thunder boomed. Soon torrential rain was turning the surface of the lake into frothing bubbles and soaking our backpacks on the roof of the truck.

Darwin, our final destination, was quiet and the pace of life had slackened from Dry season bustle to a lazy getting-by. It was impossible to feel dry and no amount of fans managed to stir the heavy air, but there were showers, washing machines and clean sheets.

Enervating, challenging, enlightening. Truly remarkable. Broome to Darwin.

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