The Road To Imintji

TRAVELLING WESTERN AUSTRALIA’S INFAMOUS GIBB RIVER ROAD LEADS TO GLORIOUS OUTBACK LANDSCAPES AND TELLING INSIGHTS INTO THE NATION’S FIRST PEOPLES

- Bob Ramsay

WE WERE LUCKY. We got our flat as we drove into the Mount Barnett Roadhouse on Western Australia’s notorious Gibb River Road. Luckier still, three burly guys changed our tire, with dire warnings to get to the Over the Range service station to fix it, pronto.

Otherwise, well … I guess that’s why our rented four-wheel drive came with a satellite phone, an emergency locator and 10 gallons of water.

My wife, Jean Marmoreo, and I wanted to experience one of the most remote places in the English-speaking world that non-explorers can navigate on their own: the Kimberley region, an area in the northwestern corner of Australia much bigger than Ger many or Japan, with a population of just 50,000 people.

The Gibb is an iconic, tire-ripping gravel road that runs 650 kilometres through the region. In the May-through-October dry season, it’s hot and desolate. Still, your four-wheel drive better have an air-intake snorkel so it can ford the dozens of rivers you’ll cross. Oh, and watch out for the road trains, those linked trucks that can measure three times longer than the longest truck allowed in Canada and take three kilometres and clouds of blinding dust to pass. In the wet season, don’t even think of driving the Gibb. You’ll drown.

But unless you’re an Aboriginal, whose Walkabouts are both a young man’s rite of passage and a way of life, the only way to explore Kimberley is by this very bad road — or by air.

WE DID THE LATTER FIRST, taking the lay of the land from the sky before we set off down the Gibb on four wheels. To do that, we went to the jumping-off point for heli-tours in Kimberley: the HeliSpirit hangar in Kununurra.

“You from Canada, mate?” asks James Bondfield, our young helicopter pilot.