The Gorgeous Gorges

When we were talking to Australians we met on our way from Sydney to Perth, and we mentioned that we wanted to see Karijini National Park, nobody seemed to know what we were talking about. We thought that we might be pronouncing the name of the park very wrong but it turned out that Karijini is in fact a very well-kept secret.

When you approach the park, you can’t really see anything extraordinary – just a few hills here and there. You can’t see the reason why you came to the park until you are standing almost directly over it – beautiful gorges, sometimes around 100 meters deep and framed by red layered rocks.

Visiting Western Australia in cyclone season has huge advantages. Although we suffered through violent winds, we also had the gorges almost to ourselves. After the first afternoon we could almost recognize everybody visiting in the park, and by the second night, we knew half of them by name :)

Some gorges were very relaxing, with many beautiful pools to swim after walking in 47 degrees on easy walks. Some others were more of a challenge: we had to hug the rocks to get through some passages and at some point there was no way to complete the track other than swimming through it.

We very much regretted that we had to leave Karijini and only the anticipation of dolphin encounters in Monkey Mia convinced us to move on.