After crossing the Pentecost River, we left the Gibb River Road and followed the Karunjie Track. This is a great 4WD track that goes through the El Questro Wilderness Park which is situated between the Cockburn Range and the Pentecost River. We got to see some stunning sceneries and landscapes and as we later found out, this was one of the places where they shot quite a few scenes for ‘Australia’.

In Wyndham Simon decided to invest in some safety training and took Margrit and Anton to a crocodile show. They all got suitable scared on how big and strong these animals get and the fact that you just can’t spot them in the water, even when you know where they are.

From Wyndham we followed a small track along the lower Ord River. This brought us to a great bush camp spot called Mambi Island right on the edge of the river. Because we were warned that this river is invested with saltwater crocodiles and from where we were standing we could easily count 20 crocs lying on the sands, we decided to put up camp a bit away from the water just on the escarpment were we were safe from the crocs. During the night we heard quite a bit of splashing going on in the water and when we got up the next they we saw that a croc had taken a cow when it got down to the water to have a drink.

We decided to spend another relaxing day at this lovely spot and Anton was quite happy to do some fishing. We were completely speechless when he turned up with a 60cm Barramundi he had caught just with his hand line. This fish made a delicious dinner!

In the afternoon we noticed some smoke in the distance and we kept an eye on it all afternoon but it seemed to be some distance away from us and we decided to stay the night. Thankfully, one of us woke up at 10pm as there was already ash falling on us and we could hear the crackling and sizzling just in the bushes behind us. It’s not a great feeling to have a bushfire on one side and a croc invested river on the other. We packed up in record time and sped off into the night. It was quite a scary and we ended up doing the Ivanhoe crossing in the darkness. We waded through the water with only bollards giving us a hint at where to go in this wide river. At one point a small crocodile ran in front of the car reminding us of the danger and that we were in real trouble should we get stuck. We made it safe but shaken to Kununurra. The next day we returned to the Ivanhoe crossing to see it in bright daylight.

This was one of this exciting nights we all could have done without.