Lake Argyle
We stayed in Keep River National Park until we had morning tea, because we still had to eat up all our fruit and vegetables as we're not allowed to take it into WA for biosecurity reasons. We crossed the border into Western Australia around midday and we only had to throw out a bit of honey and a lemon at the official checkpoint.
A short drive later and we arrived at Lake Argyle Resort. It was very busy and took us about half an hour to book in and get a campsite assigned. (They had a wedding on that day with about 150 guests and were fully booked and even had to turn people away a bit later)
Just looking at those sardine-campsites we would have loved to drive out again. After having some beautiful, quiet campsites with hardly any people on for the last couple of days, it was a big shock getting back into a busy place again.
The scenery here was very hilly - (Kimberly stile) opposed to NT where the lake was ending more into flood plain land. So the views were nothing short of spectacular. It seems like this trip is getting better the longer we're on the road. The resort had one of those endless pools (to cold for us to get in) but good for some pictures. But the best view was from up the water tower. We went up 3 times to see it in different light conditions.
Lake Argyle - spectacular views
Lake Argyle was built around 1970 as an irrigation lake to make the area around Kununurra usable for agriculture. It currently holds water for about 30,000 ha of intense farming land. It's currently the biggest permanent inland lake in Australia with an area of 1,000km2 and holds about 20 x the water of the Sydney harbour. There are plans to increase the volume another 50% by 2018 and the Chinese, who hold a lot of land up here, would like to expand it even further.
Lavender - some of the plants grown in the Lake Argyle district.
We drove around those fields and apparently 6,500 ha of it is Sandalwood plantations. They reckon that due to illegal harvesting of Sandalwood in India and Indonesia the natural supply will stop in about 10 years. The wood currently fetches prices of around $100 for one Kg! Other produce we came across were melons, sugar cane for rum, lavender, mangos and other crops we could see in the distance, but couldn't identify.
Kununurra
Kununurra was established in the 1960's to support the development of Lake Argyle. It is also a major tourist destination as everyone travelling from NT to WA has to pass here. It has a good variety of shops and supplies however the closest big city would be Darwin 830 km to the east and Broome 1,040 to the west! What a drive to see a specialist doctor or to do some shopping on items not locally available. Despite the distances we found the local Coles supermarket well stocked and normal priced. Veggies and fruit was certainly cheaper than Brisbane. We couldn't check out the other stores, as we arrived Saturday afternoon and most shops were already closed for the weekend.
We found, as we always do, a nice lookout for the sunset and on Sunday we checked out the Hidden Valley National Park just outside of Kununurra. Again this seems to be a miniature version of the Bungle-Bungles.
Happy times, Lookout over Kununurra, Mirma (Hidden Valley NP) and Ivanhoe crossing