The Gibb River Road in WA has perhaps the worst reputation of any road in Australia. It shouldn’t exist in a Christian country as it is evil and vindictive, and should be the focus of an Eleventh Commandment. It murders cars but tortures them first. Shredded bits of its victims are scattered along its 750km length of rutted, washed-away, razor-rocked, pot-holed, corrugated horror. Advice is don’t take anything less than a 4WD, definitely don’t take a caravan or motorhome and don’t even take a tank. “Naah,” you’re thinking, “that’s exaggerated.”
What is exaggerated is the name Kalumburu Road. It winds north-west to the sea and the Mitchell Falls. It takes the Gibb River Road and twists it into something more deformed. The state of this road – better described as the secret level in Dante’s Inferno – should be signposted FOR MASOCHISTS ONLY. Even Salvador Dali couldn’t imagine the conditions between the Gibb River Road and Drysdale Station, a distance of 51km. If you manage to get there you want to stay; the return journey is a frightening thought. To go further along this road is sufficient evidence of insanity, and there are several dozen drivers locked up in corrugated-iron sheds who have lost their marbles thinking about the return journey, let alone the physical, mental and financial cost of proceeding to Mitchell Falls.
Corrugations extend right across the road. They vary in width from 100mm to 600mm across and there is no letup. There is no sweet zone on the road so your vehicle is rattled and smashed so hard that your windscreen-wiper stalk and your indicators are switched on by the vibrations. The rear door, the one with the heavy spare tyre on it, is also juddered downwards with such violence that the handle won’t open it any more and the hinges are distorted. Ditto the other doors – I thought the glass would break. Essential components under the car chatter like a tapdancer on speed. The anticipation of breakage is so extreme, and the thought of being stranded out here in this super-heated landscape of broken rock is so frightening you’ll try anything to get a smooth ride. Go ahead - try anything you can think of. It won’t work.
The contents of the car fridge are hammered up and down so violently a bottle of wine breaks and two cans of beer burst. This is a serious blow to our travelling cellar, especially as no one volunteers to drink the resulting - perfectly palatable, I’m sure - white wine-and-beer mixture. Maybe it is the shards of glass in the liquid that puts people off.
I’ve run out of superlatives to describe the agony, anguish, pain, suffering, distress, misery, woe, torment, persecution, injustice, hurt, soreness, sacrifice, martyrdom and throbbing (OK, maybe not throbbing) of this experience. At the camping area at Drysdale Station a man approaches me because he also drives a Pajero. He asks if mine has special shock absorbers fitted. No, just factory shocks on my little beauty, I say. He looks downcast, as if he’d discovered his Pajero is possessed by evil spirits. He’d destroyed two sets of four shocks so far, he said, and was waiting out the 15 days it takes to have replacements flown in from Darwin to Kununurra and then onto the Mail Plane. He arrived a week ago at the moment the plane was taking off and must wait a full two weeks for it to return. Drysdale Station is not the kind of place you want to stay 2 weeks.
My car has taken a bad battering, but has held together like the mighty Samurai Warrior it is. OK, the nuts holding the spare tyre on to the door had unscrewed to within a millimetre of disaster and the Jesus bolt on the tow hitch had come loose (the Jesus bolt causes a scream of “Oh, Jesus!” when it falls off ) and the fuel consumption had risen to 21 litres/100 km, but I was confident its inherent qualities of machismo and cojones would prevail - but not confident enough to want to go further up the road.
There is no democratic vote, but a vehement negative consensus prevails – instead of driving we’ll take a scenic flight from the station’s airstrip.
