West to the Kimberley

Somewhere after the boab trees started, Roger began making a noise.

It was a squeak at first, with a small hammering sound mixed into it. Not loud enough to notice from outside the car, but clear enough inside that I started listening for it between the road noise, the wind and everything else a loaded 4WD produces after weeks of dirt roads. Once you start listening for a noise like that, it is hard to stop.

We had left Katherine that morning with East Arnhem Land behind us and another full day of driving ahead. David and Paula, friends from home in Manly, were somewhere further along the route, and we had two nights booked at Lake Argyle before meeting them in Kununurra. That put us on a bit of a schedule.

West From Katherine

Katherine had already done its job as a reset point once before East Arnhem Land, and again after the long and partially smoky drive out. We were ready to keep moving.

With more time, we would have stopped in Judbarra / Gregory National Park, which sits along the Victoria Highway and is the Northern Territory’s second-largest national park, with escarpment country, boabs, gorges and 4WD tracks. It looked like the kind of place worth several days on its own. This time we did not have them. David and Paula were waiting further down the road, and after East Arnhem Land another long day in the car was not something either of us wanted to add without a reason. Lake Argyle gave us one.

The first stretch out of Katherine was straight road and bush, nothing that asked much of us after the corrugations of the past week. Then the country began to change. More rock appeared. Escarpments closed in on the road. Boab trees started showing up beside the highway, thick-trunked and oddly shaped, and the place started to look like the Kimberley before we had officially reached it.

That was when the noise started.

The Noise

My first guess was dust in the suspension. Roger had been shaken, coated, aired down, aired up, packed, unpacked and driven across enough corrugations to justify almost any complaint by that point. But the sound had a small uneven knock to it, as if something was moving that should not have been.

We pulled over and checked around the car. Nothing obvious.

A noise you can see is a problem. A noise you cannot see is a theory generator. Suspension. Canopy. Roof rack. Something loose under the car, or inside it. A new and expensive fault announcing itself right before the Gibb River Road would have been poor timing, and we spent the next stretch of driving running through all of it.

We kept going and listened. At the second stop, we found it: the antenna was rubbing against the underside of the rooftop tent. That was the whole problem. No suspension issue, no hidden mechanical fault, just the antenna sitting at the wrong angle. We wrapped a bit of cloth around it to stop the rubbing, and the noise was gone.

The relief was out of proportion to the size of the fix, but that is usually how it goes with car noises on the road. An unknown noise takes up far more attention than a known one.

The Border

We stopped once hoping to spot crocodiles, then kept driving toward the Western Australia border. Crossing into a fourth state felt like more than another line on the map. It meant the Kimberley, the Gibb River Road, Purnululu and the west coast were no longer somewhere ahead in the abstract.

Before any of that came quarantine. Western Australia’s biosecurity checkpoint takes fresh produce and bait seriously, and we had already sorted through the fridge and pantry to work out what would not survive the border. We lost some food and our fishing bait, which was mildly annoying, and were relieved to keep all our spices, which would have hurt more.

The oranges were the real project. We knew we could not carry them across, so we ate them on the drive, probably eight between us. One orange is a snack. Eight becomes a small quiet competition against quarantine. By the border we were lighter on fruit and bait, the spices had survived, and Roger’s antenna had stopped pretending to be a mechanical failure.

Lake Argyle

Once we were in WA, Lake Argyle was close, and the country seemed to turn prettier almost right away. Western Australia was 1.5 hours behind the Northern Territory, so a drive that had looked like it would end late instead put us into camp before dark. We arrived just before 5 pm local time. The final stretch was good driving in low light, with the rocks turning redder as the sun dropped.

Lake Argyle itself is the reservoir behind the Ord River Dam, holding an estimated 20 times the volume of Sydney Harbour at full capacity. The number is hard to picture standing next to it, which is more or less the point of a number that size.

The caravan park was packed. It was a weekend, so that was not a surprise, but after the space of East Arnhem Land it felt busy immediately: sites close together, vehicles and caravans everywhere. Not remote, not quiet, just a different kind of camping. After that much driving we did not cook. The restaurant meals were only okay, but okay and not cooked by us was enough after that day. We went back to camp under a genuinely excellent sky and called it a night.

The Cruise

By the next morning the campground had emptied out as people packed up and left, and the place became easier to be in. We had a sunset boat cruise booked for the afternoon, so the morning was ordinary: breakfast, some admin, not much else.

We had heard mixed reviews of the cruise beforehand, which made me a little cautious going in. We went anyway, and it turned out to be one of the better afternoons of the trip so far.

From the water, Lake Argyle stops being just a big lake and becomes a landscape: open water, red rock, islands, bays and long sightlines that still sit inside one reservoir. We saw several freshwater crocodiles, wallaroos and fish along the way. The lake is thought to hold tens of thousands of freshwater crocodiles, which makes seeing one from the boat fairly ordinary rather than rare. It is a stranger fact to hear right before someone tells you that you can swim.

Because this is Australia, the cruise included exactly that: swimming in the lake with a drink in hand. The boat stopped, people got in, drinks appeared, and the whole thing felt more relaxed than the words “swimming in crocodile water” suggest it should. The water was excellent after the heat and driving of the past few days. We stayed near the boat, had a drink, looked at the red rock around us and did not think too hard about the freshwater crocodile population.

After the swim there were nibbles on the boat, and as the sun went down we cruised back across the lake. People were singing along, having drinks, watching the colours change. We sat on the deck and let someone else handle the route for a change. We were in our happy place.

Back at camp we cooked dinner and had an early night. The cruise had been worth the mixed reviews.

Before the Gibb

That night still belonged to Lake Argyle, but the next morning would bring Kununurra, shopping, fuel, water and the drive toward meeting David and Paula. We were about to enter the Gibb River Road, and the practical list was about to get longer again.

I started the morning with a run from the campsite out toward the dam, the sunrise spreading orange light across the escarpment behind camp. Nothing major, just a short out-and-back, but after so many days behind the wheel it was good to move under my own power for once.

The border was behind us. Western Australia was no longer an idea at the far end of the route, and the Kimberley had started with a harmless car noise, a quarantine inspection, too many oranges, a packed campground and an afternoon spent swimming with crocodiles somewhere else in the same lake.