Karijini - Handrail Pool

After Hancock Gorge we grab a quick self made lunch at the top of the gorge.  The flies are incredible.  Monbill cannot eat.  He goes and sits in the car.  The rest of us suffer with our fly nets on.  You can't imagine how many times you forget you have a fly net on and you get a mouthful of sandwich and fly net. *sigh*

Ant Hero, bringing a giant chip home

The way narrows.

After lunch we push on to see Handrail Gorge.  Monbill is tired, so he sits this one out.  The format of the gorge is the pretty much like the last one...big scary sign stating that if it threatens rain, or you are not in shape, or you don't have good shoes etc etc don't attempt this hike.  A little overstated.  Brent takes a 5 second look at the sign then starts the decent.  Steep at first, but then it calms down.  At this point we're thinking, "I wonder why they call this 'Handrail' pool?"  Is it a long thin pool like a hand rail?  I don't know.

The way narrows to something similar to the Spider Walk.  The water that you see there is usually a rushing stream.  We, however, in the beginning of summer, have only a small stream to deal with.

Maybe you can see why it's called "Handrail"

Perfect pool

I started walking ahead.  On both sides are the smooth rocks and we start to have to spider walk again.  You can hear signing emanating from the pool in front of us.  The voices of the two girls signing reverberates with an echo through the small tunnel.  At the end of the spider walk there is literally a handrail bolted to the side of the canyon.  Holding on to this handrail allows you to make the absolutely vertical decent down a couple of man made ladder rungs (again bolted to the wall) to a flat landing and a perfect natural swimming pool.  It doesn't take long for us to jump in.  Brent takes this motivation to a new level where he climbs up on a 20' ledge, scopes out the landing, and performs one of the loudest cannonballs you have ever heard.  Whoooosh.  Monbill later tells us that he also heard it from the top of the gorge.

Dinner this night was much less of an adventure.  Monbill cooked up an incredible Massaman curry using potatoes, zucchini, carrots and kangaroo meet.  Ok, it's not your typical curry ingredients but it was delicious. It felt like a complete luxury to eat outside, dry, with a plate.  You start appreciating the little things out here.  We had extra curry and our choices were put it in the trash and carry it around for a couple more days, or put it in Tupperware and maybe eat it for breakfast tomorrow.  When you don't have trash, you start thinking curry for breakfast might be a good idea.

It's still early and the little store is open, so we go over and grab a couple beers and play some cards.  Monbill invests in $30 of Coke Zero for the next day.  While playing, a couple who had actually cooked some food with us in the Monsoon the night before came looking to buy food at the store.  The store had since closed.  They looked distressed.  It turns out that while they were hiking dingoes broke into their Ute (truck) opened their cooler and ate their food.  Yeah, did I mention that we're really out in the Outback?  Packs of dingoes roam Karijini and we will eventually see them (little cute ones) in our campground.  Anyway, they were more than happy to eat our left over curry so we don't have to have it for breakfast.  Win Win.  We play cards under the light until about 8 then go to bed.  We have a long day tomorrow...actually much longer than we had planned.