Northern WA- So Much Heat! (3rd-9th Nov)

It was hot! Nothing more to say.
Really I don't have much to say about this section of our trip. The towns North of Carnarvon have very little appeal, at least to me. Broome has something of a tourist trade but for me it was too hot and barely had an interesting aspect at all, not to mention lacking in anywhere that suited us to stay.
All we could really do was read, swim and shower, with the occasional shelter in a pub, in the hope of being somewhere near the air con. It was too hot to do anything else- up to 42' by 9am and as high as 48'. So humid too.
The sea didn't even have the crystal blue appeal it had further South. There was also a higher possibility of it hiding dangerous things. The heat was incapacitating.

The only things of real beauty were the landscape and the storms. Driving up we saw lightning storms. A red light in the sky at night, and the burnt smell of the effects as we drove on the morning. Sleeping was difficult. Too hot. Even when we set up the tent, the heat would escape from the ground in the evening and turn the tent into a sauna.

The landscape was amazing though. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn (accounting for the heat) and skirted the Great Sandy Desert. So flat, barren and sun scorched. I tried to describe it as we drove along....

'It's hard to describe, this arid, scorched landscape. So empty of life yet full of it. In the heat of day nothing stirs, save for a whirlwind of dust, like a thin plume of smoke against the clear blue sky. You wander if it is smoke, so common is that too.

Flat. AS far as the eye can see and yet the straight roads seem to end at a crest which never comes. And you continue, and the landscape evolves, but never seems to change.

The soil is always red. Baked red, burnt. And there's grass; yellow, dry, brittle. Tinder. Now it's charred and patchy. Tufts which have held on, survived. Red earth shows. Shrubs, no higher than a man, sparse and stripped of leaves.

You look away. The grass is longer, like a yellow crop waiting for the harvest. Shrubs are bushier, greener, denser. A few trees spring up; slim, silver trunks. A small green canopy, like a prairie top.

The corner turns. There is nothing: scrubby grass, soil. Nothing blocks the view to a ridge of hills, hazy blue, fading far into the distance.

Grass gets greener, but never green. Trees spring up. Tall, thin, green.

Scorched black; the ground; the tree trunks. Small patches of yellow grass creep back in, surviving, barely clinging on. The leaves; dried yellow, fallen on black ash ground, yet to be whisped away in a gust of wind. A whirlwind? Smoke? The smell of fire.

And everywhere termite mounds. Sometimes few, sometimes many, like a herd of animals roaming into the distance. Silent, unmoving, turned to earth. All red earth. Small and skinny, like wallabies in the bush. Tall and skinny. Or bulbous, like a nightmare. The Elephant Man.

Suddenly a rock, dropped in the middle of nowhere, only as you draw nearer, it's more like a mountain. It towers above you, alone; no gently sloping foothills, no gradually steepening gradients, no accompanying mountain range. It's just there. A jagged rock out crop, dropped without president in the middle of nowhere: red, vegetationless, beautifully beautiful, bare to the elements.

You blink. It's all changed again. A hawk circles.'