Australian travels...: Day 19 -Drive to Edith Falls

Today was another long day of driving, so once again, we where up early. We had our 2 1/5 our drive out of the BB, and my friend Marina and I challenged each other to try and drink from a can on the 4WD drive road without spilling anything. She had a can of coke and started, and all I had was a slab of beer that was under my seat - so, I had a beer at 0730 in the morning, good stuff! I did pretty well only spilling a little bit at the start! We stopped at a few roadhouses... pee breaks, petrol breaks and ice cream breaks. At one of the roadhouses I randomly ran into one of the girls that was on the first half of the tour with me. She had gone back to Perth from Broome, but then flew back to Broome and did a 9 day tour starting a few days after mine. I love it when stuff like that happens. We stopped in a small local town, Kununurra - people where able to buy more alcohol if they wished, I however did not have to as I had bought just enough, and the tour was almost over. I also tried to book accomodation for Darwin here, but was unable to as the places I tried where all full - lovely, I was going to have to sleep on the streets! Micheal, who was on the first half of the tour with me as well was also hostel-less, so we where both in the same boat. As it turned out, when we got to our camp that night, we found a payphone and was able to book into a place - phew! That afternoon we drove to Lake Argyle - the second largest artificial lake in all of Australia. It is massive, with an average of 1,000 square kilometers (depending on how much it rains). We went on a boat cruise, and needless to say, we only saw a small portion of it. We where also allowed to bring beer on board as our guide knew the owner of the boat cruise, awesome as it was a long day of driving - we didn't get to the lake till about 3:30. We saw some cool things on the lake, a couple fresh water crocs, one that we got quite close to! A cute rock wallaby that also had her joey with her, who was out of the pouch. The captain of the boat said that was the first time he had seen the joey out of the pouch. He brought food for the wallaby and the mom came right down close to the boat to get the food - so very cute! Some also saw some really cool fish that if you hold bread out above the water, they will spit water at it - and you are supposed to drop the bread in the water and they will eat it. If you don't drop the bread in the water, they will spit water at you!! Marina got spit in the eye twice as the person beside her wasn't dropping the bread in the water and I guess Marina was in the way. We also had an opportunity to cliff jump. You could jump as high as you wanted, and I started small at about 4 or 5 meters and worked my way up. The highest point was about 15 meters high and the captain said you shouldn't plug your nose from the height as when you hit the water, it can push your arm up and can possibly break your nose. No thank-you I said, so I had a couple practice jumps from about 8-10 meters jumping without plugging my nose - yes I did it, but as soon as I was in the water, I plugged it! So, I went to the top, and Micheal was there. I was a little freaked out and he said you just have to run and jump, not think about it. So he took a few steps and off he went. I looked down and realized how high up I was, waited for him to get out of the way, I took a few steps back, said a little prayer, and before I could stop myself, I jumped. Arms out at my side so I landed straight in the water, and at the last second, put my arms at my side, both of them. I was the only girl to jump from that height and had fun doing it. If it wasn't so late and we didn't have to leave right away I would have done it again, but it was getting pretty dark out, so we left. Once we got back on board we had to find a place to sleep as we once again detoured from the itinerary and didn't really have anywhere booked to stay! We went to the Lake Argyle camp ground and Justin went in and talked to the owner who was kind enough to let us stay there. He had a large open field where we set up camp and had a campfire. We had burritoes for supper that night and man where they good! I think I had three of them - my excuse was all the cliff jumping I did :) Justin brought out the didgeridoo that night and I had a go on it. I didn't do too bad and really enjoyed playing it. I could have practiced for hours! That night was a pretty bad night for sleeping, I got eaten alive my mosquitoes, they would get in the smallest of cracks in the swag and buzz in my ear. And when I got up in the morning, I had three bird shit stains on my swag - what a night! haha.