El Questro and Manning Gorge

El Questro is a privately owned working cattle station and Wilderness Park. It has some of Australia's most expensive accommodation, but also a camp ground, for travellers like us. As its towards the end of the dry season, the waterholes and gorges are a bit low, but the swimming hole at El Questro Gorge, where Alan and Rick are swimming on the left, was small, but crystal clear. It was a 2 km walk up to this spot, and the adventurous could clamber over that big rock behind them, and go further up to bigger pools, but we were happy to stop at this one. There was a family of reasonably sized fish who would liked to hand around you in the water, which I found a bit disconcerting. We all agreed that this place was the nicest swimming hole, with Buley's waterhole at Litchfield a close second. There were lots of places to walk or drive to at El Questro. We stayed there for three very hot nights - one morning we hired a tinny and cruised up Chamberlain Gorge - the largest at El Questro. Anne caught a reasonable sized catfish, which we threw back.

The photo on the right is our car and camper trailer at the Manning Gorge campground. You can see we are camped under a very large Boab tree. There was a large sandy pool nearby which was good for swimming, although there were freshwater crocodiles there. We thought this was the nicest place we camped on the whole of the Gibb River Road.