The next 2 days we spent travelling west across the Great Northern Hwy towards Derby on the west Kimberley coast. The first day we travelled through Halls Creek and stopped for the night at Fitzroy Crossing. These were the only 2 other towns along this stretch of highway.

Halls Creek was established as a gold mining town in the late 1800s. The gold rush only lasted 3 or 4 yrs there, then it became basically a ghost town. It re-established eventually as a service town to the surrounding pastoral holdings. There were a couple of points of interest to see there. One was a statue of Russian Jack outside the shire hall. This statue is dedicated to a gold miner who pushed an injured miner mate over 300km in a wheelbarrow to get help – it serves as a memorial to the comraderie and loyalty of these bush pioneers. The other attraction we visited was called ‘China Wall’ and was just 6km out of town. It is a section of quartz reef that is on a fault line and had been ‘pushed’ up out of the ground below. It looked like manmade white bricks making a section of wall, but it is just the limestone quartz with marks on it. We had a chance then to teach the younger girls about the Great Wall of China. We also stopped in the town centre of Halls Creek to pick up just a few groceries and visited a camping and electrical store to buy a new caravan electrical cord.

It was then another 2 hrs to Fitzroy Crossing which we reached by 4pm. The mighty Fitzroy River is large enough that it still had plenty of water in it, even this late in the dry season. We stayed at a very nice caravan park called Fitzroy River Lodge. It had very lush green grass – obviously water is not too much of an issue there. They had a nice swimming pool which the kids swam at just before dinner.

The next day, we drove the 200 or so km to Derby, arriving soon after lunch. We checked into the Kimberley Entrance Caravan Park, set up and had some down time for a while. At around 3pm, we drove down to the port and the circular jetty to view the high tide. Derby is said to have the biggest tide variations in Australia, with a difference of up to 11m between high and low tide. There were quite a few people fishing off the jetty at low tide. Apparently the best time to fish off the jetty was an hour before high tide (incoming tide) and an hour after high tide (outgoing tide). We took a walk around the circular jetty and saw different fisherpeople with their catches. One friendly couple saw the kids and asked if they would like to pull up the crab pots that they’d lowered down earlier. Sam was glad to oblige. There was nothing in it, but the man showed us a good sized crab he had caught on the incoming tide. There was definitely no swimming off the shores of Derby due to the presence of saltwater crocs. We then drove to the public swimming pool the van park owner had told us about ( no pool at the van park) and the kids enjoyed a swim. It was a very nice swimming pool, with a water play area for youngsters as well as a 25m pool and toddler pool. They swam for about an hour and then we headed back to the van for dinner. We made plans for the next day – doing a day trip to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek.