Ask this desk to reserve a trip across the Kimberley in the dry season, twelve nights on unsealed road

Twelve nights and six hundred and sixty kilometres of gravel

The unsealed road between Derby and Kununurra runs six hundred and sixty kilometres and it is the spine of the trip. Corrugations set in on the graded sections and do not let up. Conversation stops. Anything not tied down migrates to the back.

Distance is the real feature of this country. Two hundred and fifty kilometres between one gorge and the next is ordinary, with open ground the whole way between, and a driving day can run six hours for two stops.

Near the eastern end the road crosses a river at a concrete ford, with the water usually a foot deep in June and less later in the season. That river is tidal well above the crossing and saltwater crocodiles use it, so nobody stands in it and nobody swims anywhere on the main river system. The rule is absolute, and it is not the same rule that applies up in the gorges.

Why does water stay in the gorges all year?

Rain falls here between December and March and then stops completely. By September much of this country has had none for six months, and creeks that carry water in February are dry sand you can walk along. The gorges are the exception.

The sandstone takes water like a sponge and lets it go slowly through the year, so pools at the foot of the walls stay full and cold long after any surface flow has gone. Some of them are twenty feet deep at the end of the dry season.

One gorge at the western end is not sandstone at all. It is cut through a limestone reef that grew in a warm sea about three hundred and fifty million years ago, and the walls carry fossils of that reef where the river has scrubbed them clean. Freshwater crocodiles lie on the sand there in numbers. They are not the dangerous species and they move away from people, but the guides set a distance and hold everyone to it.

Swim across before the walk begins

The route into one of the central gorges opens with a swim. The pool at the start is about eighty metres across, and packs go over on a float kept on the shore for that purpose, pushed ahead with one hand.

On the far side there is two kilometres over bare rock to the falls, marked with cairns rather than cut as a path, and the last section drops steeply on ledges. Most groups take fifty minutes each way and the return is hot.

Further west there is a cave to walk through. A creek has cut seven hundred and fifty metres straight through a limestone range, and you go in at one end with a torch and come out the other. There is wading to the knee in most of it and to the waist in one place, the roof stands high enough to walk upright the whole way, and about halfway along it has collapsed and lets down a shaft of daylight.

Corrugations, flies and a waterfall that shrinks

The waterfalls shrink as the season goes on. In May and June they carry real volume. By September several are a wet stripe down a rock face with a pool at the bottom, and the four tiered falls in the north are a different thing in May than they are in September. The trip runs in both months anyway, because the roads are at their best late and the water is at its best early, and nobody gets both.

Flies arrive at about nine in the morning and stay. They go for eyes and mouth, waving does nothing, and a head net is the only thing that works.

Heat climbs through the season. May gives thirty two degrees by day and cool nights. September gives thirty six to thirty eight by day and nights that barely drop, in country with no shade at all between one gorge and the next.

Where $6,880 else goes

This departure sits on the $6,880 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $6,880 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table