​Bungle Bungles 11 July 2017

 

Your fearless adventurers buckled in and ready to take off! It was cosy but we both had perfect window seats. 

Our wheels and wings for a few hours.

The countryside we flew over on the way to the Bungle Bungles, was fascinating. Huge valleys dug out by rivers which barrel through the land during the wet. We want to do this again in the wet. It would be stunning!

The World Heritage Bungle Bungle Range looms up as oddly striped bee-hive domes, towers and other weird shapes and stretches across 450 sq k in the Purnululu National Park. The range is sandstone with an outer coating of a few millimetres in alternating bands of black showing the presence of cyanobacteria (which exist where there is a little moisture) and red/rust where the iron in the exposed sandstone has oxidised. The range and National Park lies 300 k from Kunanurra so we decided on a flying visit - literally! It was just the two of us with pilot and guide in a cosy little 6 seater Cessna.

These pix of the strange land forms speak for themselves. Zoom in the get a better look at the stripes and weird formations. Enjoy!

The views were awesome - deep narrow gorges, the domes and tower formations themselves as well intriguing landmarks such as the Piccaninny crater which is the eroded remains of former impact crater and named after nearby Piccaninny creek.

The National park, home to these awesome land formation, is also home to hundreds of plants and bird species. It's a very rich and diverse area only discovered by westerners in the 1980s.

We were airborne for well over 2 hours and enjoyed every minute of it - despite periods of gut-churning turbulence at low altitudes while we were flying over the range - of course! It was well worth it.