We are on holiday!

Tuesday 9th August 2022

This morning Richie got up early to go fishing again, while the kids and I had a lazy morning lying in the tent reading, until the sun eventually drove us out! Richie returned empty handed, but had a beautiful morning on the creek. He also assured me the fan was worth every cent, so he must have slept!

During breakfast we noticed a lot of great bowerbird activity near our campsite. These are mostly grey, with white flecks, but the males have this fantastically bright pink crest on the back of their heads that they display. Bonnie was keen to know what the bowers look like, compared to the satin bowerbirds at home. We scouted about a bit but only found a demolished one, so we headed over to the caretakers camp to ask if he knew of any. He took us to a very well presented bower near the boat ramp – they appear to like white and silver, judging by the collection of stones and beer can pulls! We also noticed the boabs trees are full of hollows, and saw some white cockatoos in some. The campsite has a great diversity of birds, we have spent quite a lot of today just watching them around us!

After that burst of activity we spent a very lazy day around the campsite, sitting in the shade of the tent and not doing anything much. Thankfully there was a breeze all day so it was quite pleasant – a still day would have been unbearably hot. We had a few visits and chats with a nearby camper that I spoke to last night. Richie has been repeatedly mentioning how horrified he is that not only did I choose to talk to someone who somewhat resembles John Jarrat in Wolf Creek, but he has twice today gone into great detail about why we should go visit Wolf Creek, which is his next destination. I’m pretty sure Richie won’t sleep tonight! 🤣🤣🤣 Actually he seems quite nice, and brought Otis a little silver truck to play with, that Otis has either half burried in the red sand, or a bowerbird has taken it. He is also quite the conspiracy theorist, and it is always fun to listen to some new ideas about things. 😉

The kids played in the dust with toy dinosaurs and Bonnie’s little pipe cleaner people that she makes for much of the day, and we made a concerted effort to get through all our fruit and veg, that we can’t take into WA tomorrow.

Jess contacted us about Richie’s barra catch, and mentioned that we should be eating the boab fruits, so that set us into a new task! Richie set off fishing again , and the kids and I went looking for boab seed pods that weren’t already smashed, or too high in a tree. The campground yielded no entire pods, but a short excursion out of the campground and we found an enormous tree with lots of pods on the ground. The kids went crazy picking up as many as we could hold. 😆 Interestingly the tree has stakes stuck in it up the trunk, for climbing I suppose, but the bottom few had been removed so we couldn’t try it out. I would have been pretty tempted otherwise!

We brought the pods back to our campsite and the kids smashed them all open. Most were too old but a couple were still white in the middle, and we tried eating the pithy stuff around the seeds. The website I checked about eating boabs described them as having a chalky texture, with a sour flavour similar to ‘lemon, sherbet and powdered milk.’ A pretty good description actually, and quite fun to try (thanks Jess). Bonnie wants to find more now to try make a drink with them. We just need to work out how to get them out of the tree! During my brief boab research I also discovered that there is a hypothesis that the boab was brought here by ancient Africans 60 – 70,000 years ago. The distribution of boabs in Australia, limited to the Kimberleys region, also matches the distribution of some rock art called Bradshaw paintings, which are done using a distinct style and materials that don’t match Aboriginal rock paintings, and it has been proposed that these were done by an ancient civilization that originated in Africa! Super interesting, and very controversial of course. 😊

Richie returned empty handed again, though I think had a nice time. Since this site was specifically planned for fishing opportunities, I think he feels he better make the most of it! Though I’m not sure what would happen if he actually caught another barramundi, there is no more space in the freezer! The national park sounds amazing and there are lots of places to visit, but it is mostly 4WD high clearance access, and there isn’t much we can get to, so we haven’t planned to do anything otherwise.

We cooked sausages and potatoes in the fire for dinner, then straight to bed for Richie, suffering a headache, and the kids. It’s another clear bright night – the full moon is only 2 days away, and thankfully it feels like a much cooler night!