Purnululu (The Bungle Bungles)

I have been wanting to go to the Bungle Bungles since I first read about it 20 years ago. We missed it last time we went around Australia because we went in the wet season when it’s closed. The park is only open from sometime in April to the end of September.

Formation

The park is famous (and world heritage listed) for its rocks and dome shapes. In summary, over millions of years, there were a LOT of floods and rivers running through. The rivers and floods deposited lots of those lovely round river stones/rocks. Over millions of years, these rocks kept piling up on top of each other until they were several hundreds of metres (or kilometres) tall. All that pressure made the river rocks compress together and form conglomerate rock. Then, the winds and other floods eroded these conglomerate rocks into the shapes they are today.

Then, a bacteria grew along the rocks forming the black rings (no one knows why they grow in lines like this) and iron oxide has turned the rocks red. This results in the ‘stripes’ that you see on the rock formations.

Getting There

This park is really remote. Not only is it in a very low populated area (read almost no one lives for hundreds of kilometres around here), but the road from the highway into the park is also a major effort. No wonder most people ‘do the bungles’ by air!

We stayed at the caravan park just off the highway by the road entrance to the park and then spent one night in the park itself in the tent. The road into the park is 57 km of pretty heavy 4WD – corrugations, river crossings, etc. So there was no way we were going to take the van! (In fact, double axle vans aren’t allowed).

The kids were both car sick and vomited a few times on the road. But after about 2 hours, we finally reached the Visitor Info Centre.

The Campground

The park is divided into two sections: The north and the south. Each section has its own unique landscape. The visitors centre is located at the entrance to the park and in the middle. It is then another 50 km to either the southern walks or the northern walks. And, there is a campground on each side. We booked the campground in the south. Since it was way too hot to start walking we decided to set up camp and then go for the Cathedrale Gorge walk in the south late in the afternoon when it cooled down a bit.

It was so hot at the campground that R decided to cool the kids off by splashing some bore water on them. Unfortunately, the water was hot so it wasn’t as refreshing as it could have been!

The Southern End

We drove down to the southern end walks and the domes. As soon as we glimpsed the domes, I had to take a selfie – I have waited 20 years to see this!

We did the Dome Walk around the domes and then the walk into Cathedrale Gorge – which was huge!

Here are some photos of the Dome walk.

The end of the walk through the domes to Cathedral gorge takes you to a massive opening where for half of the year there is a waterfall and pool of water. Just look how big the space is compared to the humans!

As we left the Dome area, the sun began to set and offered us some beautiful views:

The Northern End

The next morning we headed to the northern end of the park which is quite different from the southern end.

We did the walk into Echidna Chasm which was very cool and the kids said was one of their favourite walks so far in Australia. At one point the chasm opened up into a big amphitheatre chamber where there were some benches to sit on and wait until 11am when the sun starts streaking through the chasm into the chamber. The day was again really hot (around 40C / 100F) but inside the chasm it was nice and cool.

Here’s the walk into the chasm:

And some photos from inside the chasm:

After our walk at Echidna Chasm, we head back down the bumpy road to the caravan park where we had nice refreshing showers and were greeting by some visitors.

The Road West

After the Bungle Bungles, we spent the next two days driving to the west coast and Broome. Along the way, we saw some beautiful boab trees.