I wasn’t expecting much from Hall’s Creek to be honest. Just another town we needed to pass through and a place to top up with fuel and water and buy a bit of food before heading into Purnululu. I was wrong. It turned out to be a lovely town with some nice shops, including a great butcher which also did ice creams that became very popular in our family. Matthew has even been asking when we can go back to that ice cream shop and it’s now a couple of weeks later.
However, it was the countryside around Hall’s Creek that I really enjoyed. It’s rugged savannah dominated by Spinifex and red rock and looks like it belongs in The Lion King. The views were amazing and Lindy and I agreed it would be an amazing place to build a dream holiday house if we had more money than we knew what to do with – totally impractical for weekend trips from Melbourne of course, but I guess that wouldn’t matter.
Anyway, after a long day of driving out of Judbarra/Gregory NP and then along the Buntine Hwy into Western Australia we ended up driving past sunset. That’s pretty rare for us lately. We’ve kept to our plan of having reasonably short days of driving and it’s been rare for us to get to camp after dark. The sunset was amazing so I just had to stop for some photos.
We had planned to just go to the caravan park in Hall’s Creek but WikiCamps put us off that idea with numerous stories of thefts and break ins so instead we pulled into Caroline Pool, a small free campground just out of town. At first it doesn’t look too promising – just a dirt car park basically which might be fine in a caravan but not for tents. But then we realised you’re supposed to keep driving down into the dry river bed and we found one of our best campsites yet. It was also one of the very few we’ve had with no other people around.
The local council do a great job of maintaining the campsite with clean toilets. But plenty of credit must also go to the local community art centre which has coordinated local artists to paint signs on old car bonnets for attractions all around town.
The toilets have had a similar treatment:
Heading on from Caroline Pool into town the next morning we saw a sign to China Wall and figured we’d have a look. It turned out to be a pretty impressive quartz seam which is exposed to form a long ‘wall’.
Matthew chose to stay in the car but Izzy loved climbing on the wall and walking it’s length, which must have been over 100m.
Love the signs.