Homeward bound-- 10 Sep 2018

Sunday morning dawned a every other day has here, sunny and already hot.  I slipped next door to the  Grand Hotel for a continental breakfast.  Their reception had checked out scenic flights last night for me, only to find that both companies were booked out.  So I didn't get to see the diamond mine and Bungle Bungles from the air.

Did the 8.30 am Mass which saw the small church quite crowded.  The local pastor is an African, and quite a performer.  I forgot my hearing aids so don't know what the longish sermon was about, but the antics of the speaker made up for it.  Then drove up to Kelly's Knob lookout vers a good view of the town and the beginnings of the irrigated farmlands.  Next I checked out the diversion dam which holds back Lake Kununurra and feeds controlled flow into the Ord River for the rest of its flow to the ocean, providing irrigation as it goes.  After that I took a few km drive out to the beginnings of the irrigated farms.  This one grows sandalwood.. Hectares of host trees in neat rows with the sandalwood growing attached as a parasite plant.  The harvested wood is chipped and distilled under steam pressure to extract the oil which is mainly sold to the perfume industry world wide.

Back to town and I cashed in a 10% discount card at the old Pump Station lakeside.. It used to lift water from the low levels to the irrigation channels before Lake Argyle came on stream.  Now it is a nice little restaurant which serves an excellent salad for lunch.  One last circuit of the town and I headed to the airpor and returned the car to Thrifty.  Virgin flight for Perth left 10 minutes early and arrived 20 minutes head of schedule.  Which just means I now have over 3 hours to fill In here at Perth airport for my overnight flight home.  C'est la vie! Finis.

And the last of my photographic effort can be discovered here.