Kununurra is the Kimberley's tidy, green front door, a town built in the early 1960s to serve the Ord River Irrigation Scheme and set among red ranges and wide, flat farmland. For anyone finishing the Gibb River Road, it is the first place in hundreds of kilometres with a supermarket, a bakery and a hot shower that does not smell of bore water.
The landscape around it is remarkable. The Ord River was dammed in the 1960s and early 1970s, creating Lake Argyle, a vast inland sea that holds far more water than Sydney Harbour and supports freshwater crocodiles, wallabies on the shoreline and a surprisingly rich population of waterbirds. Downstream, Lake Kununurra is a calm reach edged by boab trees, those fat, bottle-shaped giants that seem to have been designed by a child. A short ride from town, Mirima National Park, sometimes called the mini Bungle Bungles, has beehive-shaped ranges in banded orange rock and an easy walk among them.
For the rider, the end of the Gibb is a mix of triumph and exhaustion. The track behind you is corrugated gravel with river crossings, which can close entirely in the wet season from about November to April, and the road leading in from the west is mostly good bitumen with the occasional roadtrain. Early morning and late afternoon bring the best light on the ranges, and the wildlife, mostly wallabies and cattle, is most active then, so slow down. Heat is the real constraint here: even in the dry season, from May to October, afternoons are hot, and the wet season brings a sticky humidity that most riders avoid.
Fuel, food, tyres and supplies are all available in town, which has nearly seven thousand people, and the main street is a convenient place to hose off a week's worth of red dust. Aboriginal art galleries in town sell the work of local artists from the Kimberley and are worth a look.
If you can, stay for sunset by the lake, where the boabs go black against a red sky.