Bird's eye - Lake Argyle & the Bungle Bungles

Took to the air today, a 2 hour flight in a tiny aeroplane, out across Lake Argyle and down to the Bungle Bungles. What can one say? The views are spectacular, the commentary informative and entertaining.

Lake Argyle. A man made lake, largest one in the southern hemisphere, backs up the Ord River for 60km and holds umpteen times the volume of Sydney Harbour, which is the international measure of volume. They added 1m to the height of the spillway and doubled the volume. They had a huge wet season the other year and the water level was 18m over the top of the spillway. There's enough water to give every Australian 300litres a day until hell freezes over. We were led to understand that it's B-I-G. Let the snaps speak for us.

Bungle Bungles. Getting there, about 200k south of Kununurra, you fly over breathtaking country, huge stations that run into millions of acres, four tectonic plates lifted up on edge, ranges of rubble that they suggest are 1.5 billion years old and which once were 27km high. The country is vast, and ancient, and devastatingly beautiful. The Bungles are almost incidental to the prevailing scenery but are in themselves spectacular with the iconic tiger striped bee-hive mountains and cavernous gorges. Again, I'll just have to let the snaps tell the story.

Argyle Diamond mine. We pass over the open cut mine and tailings, the workings, the resort and the airstrip. We hear how it was found by two geologists looking for uranium and how the company they worked for and how that company employed all the subterfuge they could muster to steal the lease away from the then lessees... stuff that movies are made of.  We hear of the intense security, the men an women flown in from Perth every two weeks and how the airport runway is laid over another zillion dollars worth of diamonds and will be the last thing bulldozed. I was struck by the high tech employed to pick out the diamond rocks from the 5 tonnes a minute passing over the device which uses x-rays, computers and jet air blasts to pick out individual 1.5mm to 1.5cm pebbles with an accuracy of 99.9%. Our pilots name was Bond, James Bond.

We had a fantastic 2 hours, Judy even forgot for a while to be petrified. We took 400 snaps between us. I have selected 30 and put them up on this blog You'll all have to wait for the slide night and fondue to see the rest!

Snaps of the day

Lake Argyle

Bungle Bungles