Lake Argyle 3

Monday the 8th we walked through a bush track from the Lake Argyle Van village to the Durack Homestead. When the Ord Dam was built and the valleys were then flooded to form Lake Argyle, the Argyle Downs cattle station, owned by the Durack family, went under water. The Durack’s were not against it as it was Kimberly Durack’s idea. The station and a couple of other very large stations nearby were established by Patsy Durack. Starting in 1883, he and his brothers and business partner drove 7000 cattle, and horses and some sheep from their holdings in central Queensland. It was a 3 year long drove and he lost half his stock and a few men. Droughts, floods and disease hampered their progress. It is an amazing story and I am keen to download the book, ‘Kings in Grass Castles’, written by Patsy’s grand-daughter, and start reading.

The homestead on Argyle Downs was taken apart stone by stone and faithfully restored on the site it is now, near the dam. It was amazingly cool inside.

Monday night was movie night and Red Dog was showing. Had seen it before but I was glad we saw it again.

Next day Linda and I went to just below the dam to fish in the Ord River and have a picnic. Didn’t get a bite but it’s not about that anyway, is it? The area was just so beautiful. The picnic in the park was very peaceful.

On Wednesday the 10^th we went with neighbours, Kay & Doug, to a spot on Spillway Creek that Doug had been told about where there should be some reasonable size fish. Kay & Doug wound up pulling in two good size Cobbler catfish. The fish in the photos are not the ones we kept. They were the tiddlers.

Freshwater catfish in WA use to be considered a very ordinary white fish meat and sold cheaply. Someone decided to change the name to Cobbler and greatly increase the price and it started selling in a big way. We had a great fish dinner that night eating our fresh Cobbler catch. Linda and I only caught little bottlenose catfish, not even anygood for eating, but we still enjoyed the day immensely.

Thursday and Friday have been filled in with a couple of walks near the village, doing some trip planning, making some bookings for the Horizontal Falls tour and the Bungle Bungles van park. You have to do a bit of planning at least or you don’t get to go on these great things you want to do. It gets busy at this time of year and we only just got in with our booking for the Horizontal Falls and that was over three weeks in advance for that booking.  Three or four days either side of our preferred booking date were booked out so we were very blessed to have made our booking when we did. One of the reasons why the bookings were so heavy right at that time is that was when the tides were at their best for a month and it just so happened that our preferred day was among the best, so doubly blessed.

We got the last powered site at the Bungles van park. We will be leaving our van there in storage while we tent it into the Bungles.

We further filled in our time with meeting a lovely Kiwi couple, John and Lisa and their gorgeous little five year old Madeline. Such nice people and it was great to be able to get info on Cape Leveque from them as they have already been there. It is good to do some research but being able to get timely, accurate info from fellow travelers is priceless. We keep getting great tips from people but it is a pleasure to be able to pass on stuff that we have found out too. We thought we better make a booking for Cape Leveque as they said that it was booked out when they were there. So made the call and could only get one night powered and two nights camping as it was school holidays. We will have to go to other campsites to see the rest of the Cape. Cannot take the van as the road is to rough. We will just have to get by with one night of power to charge up the jump pack battery and the spare battery that we run the fridge/freezer with. Luckily that powered site night is in the middle of the eight days we will be away from the van and tenting it. As we won’t have solar we will have to get by with charging all the devices by a bit of driving, the powered night and the camp hosts hopefully doing us a favour by plugging in the jump pack through the day for a couple of days.

What a wonderful week we have had at Lake Argyle! It has been one of our two most favourite destinations of our trip so far which is just on two months travelling. The other favourite was El Questro. Hard to split them. One common thing to all the Kimberleys is the balmy tropical nights. It is just so comfortable, sitting out of a night in singlet, shorts and thongs. Oh, sorry to rub it in for those in the south.