Hi Mike,
With regards mobile phone coverage, once you head out of Broome along the
Gibb River Road, there is no mobile phone coverage at all.
With ever increasing tourist traffic, the Gibb River Road has improved dramatically
over the years but this is a road that is typically closed between about January and
May due to the wet.
North of Broome at Cape Leveque there is some mobile phone coverage to
service the aboriginal communities there.
But unless you have a satellite phone, the only way to communicate to the
outside world is via the public phones that are at some of the homesteads,
such as Drysdale River Station and at places such as the Barnett Roadhouse.
But when you consider that stations such as Drysdale are a million acres you
can appreciate it can be a very long way to the next phone.
If you have not done so already, I would be impressing upon your family
that you may go several days at a time without being able to phone them and so
they should not panic.
Likewise with work. Somehow we managed to transform ourselves from a time
when a holiday was a holiday and a bloke would be left in peace for a couple
of weeks. But these days, as you are well aware particularly in areas such as IT,
work colleagues or the boss somehow expect that they can just phone you day
or night often with the most trivial questions.
And for some, particularly
for workers who are more newly arrived in Australia, the concept there are
parts of the country where one can be incommunicado due to a lack of telephone
infrastructure is something they can be blissfully unaware of. It starts one
morning with one of the junior programmers wanting to know if they can rename foo.c to bar.c
and by the time it gets to lunchtime and you haven't responded to the message they left
on your mobile phone, panic sets in. By the next day it is escalated all the way
to corporate management and they quickly reach the only logical conclusion which
is that you must certainly be dead. By the time you get back to work, someone
has not only swapped your good office chair for one with coffee stained
upholstery and a broken caster, as the final
coup de grace, a student on work experience
has been given your desk, computer and coffee mug.
With the exception of items such as toiletries, pies and drinks, the roadhouses
have very little else to offer so if you haven't bought it by the time you left
Broome, you aren't going to find it.
From a sightseeing point of view, what the Gibb River road is largely about
is that it is punctuated by numerous scenic gorges, particularly along its
western extent. A lot of your time will undoubtedly be spent going down into
the gorges. There are no shops there, just lots of sunshine and in some but not all,
mostly harmless freshwater crocodiles. At Windjana Gorge the freshwater
crocodiles in parts can be impressively packed cheek by jowl, so watch where you
tread.
The best baobab trees to photograph are predominantly found in the western
extent of the Gibb River Road.
Keep a sharp eye out for beautiful Gouldian finches in the shrubbery around
creek crossings. Apparently becoming rarer and rarer.
Awesome. That will be a busy 48 minutes of photography.
