WARMUN - HALLS CREEK

Along the Tanami Track

Bethany opening a gate along the Tanami

The world's second largest meteorite crater, Wolfe Creek, WA

David and Beth, the intrepid adventurers

DAY 45 – WARMUN – HALLS CREEK                                                                     Tuesday, 16^th August

A very big milestone was reached yesterday along our trip to Purnululu – we reached the magical 10,000 kilometres travelled!!!  Amazing!!  My original estimation was 16,000 kms for the trip so I think I am going to be well short!!

Sunset over the Tanami

So, here we are at Halls Creek, which surprisingly has an enormous recreation centre with a big public pool, information centre and a great little IGA.  That is where the excitement ends, I’m afraid.  We came here specifically to go to the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater which is 150 kms away, down the Tanami Track.  But after our big day yesterday, it seemed hard to put the kids in the car again for 5 more hours of four wheel driving.  So we came to Hall’s Creek and set up the van.  The caravan park is what you would call extremely average, with virtually no shade at all, no grass and the ground is too hard to get the tent pegs into!!  All the bread here has been frozen and is stale.  The water is warm and we are trying to keep things cold in a cooler bag with ice that keeps melting!  Fridge not working at all.  We do have a working freezer, however, so if only we could use frozen milk we would be fine!  Often it is the case that it is much easier to get people and things warm than it is to keep people and things cold!!

So David has put up the annexe for the kids to sleep in – which is a lot more work than the tent – and then gone off with Beth for the long drive to the Meteorite Crater.  All the kids were asked if they wanted to go, and of course Ben, ever trying to impress Dad, said:  “I don’t want to disappoint you by not coming, Dad”.  But the kids really needed a break so I am doing some washing and supervising journal-writing and hopefully, if there has been a good amount of homework done, we can go in the pool!!

I will get David to give the low down on the Meteorite Crater when he gets back, but I was so proud of Bethany, who decided to go with him.  She said:  “I don’t want to say that all I did at Hall’s Creek was go in the pool”.  She is getting so mature.  It will be great for David and Beth to have some time together.  The kids very rarely get one of us to themselves. 

David:  “It was no surprise that my call for a party to head out on an intrepid adventure to Wolfe Creek Crater was met with a deafening silence.  Maybe it was the screening of Wolf Creek the night before, though I suspect in reality it was 280 kms of corrugated roads that put my adventurous family off the journey.  Eventually Bethany took pity on her father and like Burke and Wills (albeit with a little bit more water) the intrepid adventurers set out.  After overtaking two camels on the Great Northern Highway we drove 120 kms along the Tanami Track to Wolfe Creek reserve.  A further 20 kms of spine-damaging corrugations and we arrived at the world’s second largest meteorite crater.  An almost perfectly circular rim, 880 metres in diameter, surrounds a sandy crater bed with a small salt pan centre.  Bethany and I explored the area for about three quarters of an hour and observed Ring-Tailed Dragons along the sandy paths before embarking on the return journey.  It is believed that a meteorite of around 50,000 tonnes impacted here 300,000 years ago.  The crater was originally 120 metres deep which gives an amazing idea of the size of the collision.  The return journey as the sun set was quite beautiful as we observed cattle walking in single file to watering points and wallabies becoming more active in the cooler part of the day.  The day was completed when we returned to romantic music and a candlelit dinner of lemon chicken prepared by my wife.  Burke and Wills could have only dreamed of this at the Dig Tree”.

The trip took them over 5 hours so they did very well!