Adventure playground

It was twilight, and in the soft amber light cast by the walls of the gorge you couldn't be sure about the shapes that smudged the water's sheen. Then two luminous orbs materialised from the gloom, and beside them another pair, and another.

Kevin, our driver, had told us there were crocodiles in the gorge, but they weren't the sort to worry about. They were the freshwater variety - "freshies" - with a reassuringly English name, crocodilus Johnsonii, which hopefully went with a tendency to stay well away from strangers.

Fortified by Kevin's bush wisdom, we shed our sticky clothes under the paperbark trees a safe distance upstream. After a pummelling eight-hour drive from Broome into the Kimberley we relished the hospitality of Windjana's waters - while trusting that the Johnsons had already eaten.

There were 11 of us on the four-wheel-drive Oka (a robust Australian four-wheel-drive vehicle), from six different countries. Germans, Swiss, French, Japanese, English and even a couple of Australians. A lottery of the like-minded, whose adventurous spirits, dormant in our urban existence, had brought us together for the 11-day tour of Australia's "ultimate frontier".

Where, and what, is Kimberley? On a map of Australia it is the bump in the north-west corner, between the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia and the border of the Northern Territory, a terrain of plateaux and gorges, savannah and rainforest, creeks and waterfalls. From east to west it can be measured by the Great North Highway, in its angle between Derby and Kununurra 567 miles (914km) or - between the same points - the diagonal of the Gibb River Road 438 miles (705km). The greater length of the highway is balanced by its sealed surface, which makes it faster, but that is the sum of its advantages. The unsurfaced Gibb River Road ("recommended four-wheel drive") sorts the men from the boys. Or, more to the point, the cattle from the sheep. Constructed originally as a Beef Road, it's still used to transport cattle from the Kimberley stations to the ports of Derby and Wyndham for shipment mainly to Indonesia. The road trains, million-acre spreads and rough-hewn stockmen are potent features of the landscape, but, unwittingly, this pioneer industry, with its network of service roads and tracks, has opened up the country for a new business that in an environmentally conscious age cannot fail. However, as we discovered, the pleasures of green tourism must be earned.

"Macho time!" The job of gathering firewood saw us leaping off the vehicle to practise our skills in jumping up and down on fallen eucalyptus trees. Making logs was the first part of the business of setting up camp, the real test of our dedication to life in the wild. Next was the challenge of being the first to put up a tent: not too difficult with a "9 x 9" (peg at each corner, post in the middle).

Kitchen duty was more demanding, especially cooking in the intense heat generated by the eucalyptus. When the essential trick was to keep the meat from bonding with the pan, you could only pray that the order of the day was something simple like a "barbie", and not one of Kevin's beef stroganoffs.

Even "bush tucker" had its complications. "Damper" bread, a favourite with the aborigines, was a straightforward mixture of self-raising flour and water, baked in a camp oven. But it still required a skilled hand; the secret of success being to add a pinch of baking powder and a few raisins, so that (a) it would rise and (b) it would taste of something.

In a family of nations, campfire camaraderie required special skills. With some, gestures were easy: the offer of calamine lotion to the Japanese woman for her insect bites; a shared "tinnie" with my Australian tent- mate. Others made the going tougher: such as the retired Swiss computer scientist who described himself as a "time millionaire". Enjoying his global walkabout, but endlessly soul-searching about those colleagues in Zurich made redundant by his software.

Concerns about technological change seem strangely irrelevant in the Kimberley. The Windjana Gorge is part of a landscape that was formed 350 million years ago: fish fossils in the rock showed that it was part of an ancient barrier reef that had enclosed the submerged plateau. Tunnel Creek, nearby, was another phenomenon, burrowing 750 metres through the sandstone - those who dared changed into their swimsuits and followed Kevin's torch through waist-high water to the tunnel's outlet, trying not to think about what they might be stepping on in the dark.

In the Kimberley you would be lost without a spirit of adventure - and a sense of eternity. The cathedral-like termite mounds which dot the landscape - some of them 13ft (four metres) high - have been here for 1,000 years. So, too, have some of the huge bottle-shaped boab trees. At Derby we saw one with a girth of 14 metres, its hollow trunk so cavernous that it had once been used as a prison. This was a reminder of the lawless days at the end of the last century when the aborigines, ranged against the stockmen, found their hero in a renegade tracker named Pigeon. Like his counterpart Ned Kelly in Victoria, Pigeon (aboriginal name Jununarra) gained a reputation for destroying the local constabulary. Unlike Kelly, he was not taken alive but trapped and killed in Tunnel Creek.

Further east we drove into what some call the "real Kimberley": ranges of red sandstone poised over oceans of shimmering trees like the hulls of giant becalmed tankers. Blackened trees with burnt-out tops were the legacy of bush fires which had occurred in the previous Dry - one of the two seasons which dominate life in Australia's tropical north-west.

This period (April to October) was the only one in which our tour was possible, as the minor tracks were inaccessible in the Wet (November to March). It was on one of those tracks, branching off the Gibb River Road to the remote valleys of the King Edward and Mitchell Rivers, that we saw evidence of the level of floodwater created by the monsoon rains - driftwood hanging in the trees 10ft above the river banks.

It could have been a warning. As we pulled out of camp en-route for the Mitchell, our vehicle gently dug itself to a standstill and leaned over 15 degrees. It was undeniably "bogged". We all piled out, cameras clicking: not exactly a gesture of support for Kevin. Happily we were a convoy of two and the other driver had a tow-rope, which less happily snapped under the six-ton strain of the bogged vehicle.

Other resources were necessary. A hole was dug under the wheel and stones brought from the creek to give the tyre some grip. The tow-rope was secured, and this time the trick worked. The stricken Oka lurched out of its bed of mud to a rousing cheer.

If it's possible for a journey to have two climactic moments, then we experienced ours in the Kimberley. The first was the Mitchell Falls, a

spectacular multiple cascade tipping down a huge stepped gorge into the sea: the experience enhanced by a two-hour tropical walk through shoulder- high grass and towering palms, with a relieving swim at the head of the gorge.

The second was the Bungle Bungles, a fantastic rock formation a day's drive to the east. These beehive domes, enclosing a 656ft-high plateau, had been created by water action eroding formations of sandstone and conglomerate dating back to the Devonian period. Later deposits of silica and lichen had given the domes a decorative finish of orange and green stripes.

This geological wonder, which we circled in a dizzying helicopter ride, had only been "discovered" - as far as tourism was concerned - by a film crew that had flown over it in the 1980s. It could only happen in Australia.