Up in the morning, the leg doing surprisingly well yesterday. Still slow but moving. Water had been scarce all the way from Wyndham to last night’s camp but a couple of kilometres down the road the true pastoral country started along with farm dams and water pumps. You beauty! Even though I didn’t need water. It turns out that the eastern Kimberley is very infertile sandstone country so it is uneconomic to run cattle there, the stations such as Ellenbrae are essentially rich people’s hobby farms (Ellenbrae is owned by the Grollo family, big builders in Melbourne who fly up every now and then to helicopter around for picnics). The commercial cattle country is on the richer west Kimberley soils which I was now entering.

I got to Imintji community by late morning; the community was virtually empty as everyone had gone to Derby for a Land Council elder’s funeral but fortunately the shop was open. Unfortunately it had very little stock in it except for fuel, a Perth night restaurant bus in the carport. The shop lease had just been taken on by the same guy who runs the Mount Hart eco-retreat. Anyway I cooked up noodles for lunch in the shop garden and filled water bottles before riding off. A brand new campground with BBQs, solar panel power, hardstands and toilets had just opened on the edge of Imintji. Christine and Linda had stayed there the night before and said it was very nice.

Then after 10 kms of flat it was a long steep climb up the first tier of the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges (was until 2020 the King Leopold Ranges but King Leopold of Belgium was vicious to the natives in Africa so it seems inappropriate to name land in Australian aboriginal country after him).

The deep gorges in the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges are quite pretty. I would have appreciated them more if my foot wasn’t alternating between moderately intense ischaemic pain and numbness. Accordingly, I found a camp near the Lennard River Gorge turnoff (closed to entry because of Covid 19) and went to sleep listening to the far off dingos howling.