Sunday September 6

It's Father's Day and it makes me think of the kids and especially my lovely grandchildren just a little bit more. I think of them all the time anyway but a bit extra today, thanks for all the greetings that I received. 

This morning started off with me spilling the cereal container and Elaine has a photograph of me picking it up off the floor. I should add that what I picked up from the floor went into a container by the water tank for the birds. We don't feed wild animals but that was just like them picking up seeds from the ground. Talking about wild animals we had a pet dingo cub for company since arriving at the camp yesterday. He hung around obviously wanting food which we didn't give him but he seemed quite friendly and at one stage slept under the van. Then he disappeared overnight returning this morning. So eventually we took off leaving our pet behind heading for Lassiter Highway then Erldunda then to head south along the Stuart Highway. On the way we passed Mt Ebeneezer which is a small settlement on the edge of Ebeneezer Station. There we saw the biggest ever motorhome built on the back of a 5 ton truck and towing, on a trailer, a 4wd ute and a boat. At Erldunda we made a few phone calls along with the usual fuelling up.Then down the highway and we are now camped on the South Australian border where Elaine has been busy cooking everything that we can't take across the border fresh. 

Just another couple of comments, firstly that we keep meeting people who are eager to help where practical and who are supremely relaxed. For instance today we trying unsuccessfully to get a photo on time delay on my camera and a guy we have never met wandered over from his caravan, about 30 mtrs away, and offered to help. The relaxed bit is just so obvious when you see and chat with people in these free camps. The other thing concerns a couple we met yesterday when we stopped to look at Kathleen Springs. After looking at the story board we decided not to walk to the possible waterhole and head back to the van. On the way we met a couple who just looked from a distance from the story board then turned around to go back to their car. They had driven a few hundred kms from Alice Springs passing several nice gorges and sites to see and planned to reach the Kings Canyon Resort that night having 'seen' all the beaut things there were to see. On the following day they would 'see a bit of the countryside' while dirt biking or similar. I think that we are only getting a superficial look at inland Australia so what are they getting?

Saturday September 5

Well the afternoon siesta has been had and, while I still feel a little weary, I am back to operating standard. We are still in the land of offline blogs but hope to be back under the cover of the Telstra dome tomorrow. 

Today's project was a walk around the rim of Kings Canyon which was touted as 6 kms, grade 3 moderate to take 3 plus hours. It was a massive and exhausting climb up from the car park on a staircase using the existing rocks with concrete fill to keep them from moving. After that it was up over rocks and down to the pathway time and time again, all set up to the same standard, for the rest of the walk. In the middle was a set of stairs going down about 50 metres or so to a bridge over the so called Garden of Eden which is a glade set between high cliffs and supporting a wide variety of flora and, I presume, fauna. This is very nice to look at from the bridge and I slacked out of the detour to actually walk the garden which would have been an additional 600 mtrs. It did look beautiful from the bridge but my body was saying be sensible. Then after the bridge another set of stairs back to the heights and then another 3 kms of up and down the rocks. The view from this walk was stunning (another one of my overused words) of rock formations and structures, plants growing in the cracks and occasionally the distant countryside. The last km was downhill and this was almost as hard as going up. I guess partly because I was getting weary because, like the rest of the walk, it was very well prepared and planned. Along the way everybody, from a bunch of young American female exchange students, to a couple of families and some older people (I like to think not as old as me) passed me by. When I got to the van Elaine informed me that I had taken just 2 and a bit hours. Since I had spent quite a bit of time looking and taking photographs I was quite pleased with myself. While I had been enjoying myself on the canyon rim elaine had done the creek walk which she found interesting. 

The pity about all this is that there is so much more to understand than my superficial look at the majesty of it all, and I don't have to knowledge to apply to it or the memory to remember it all. 

Friday September 4

Well thus passes another fantastic day as we travel through paradise. However we are out of phone cover so this is being done offline. 

Our new friends from the camp near Yulara left camp well before us, 3 of them heading the same way and 1 heading to spend a few days looking at Uluru. Interestingly 2 of them had mutual acquaintances. The road to Yulara, Lassiter highway, is very busy a continual stream of buses and RVs. The view of the big rock as we drove away looked as though we were driving to it, I guess that is something to do with its size. We stopped again at the Mt Connor lookout this time for morning tea and our last photograph of the big rock. Then with a little bit of assistance from Elaine who organised pools of water we had the pleasure of seeing the tiny rainbow finches drinking and were able to photograph them. These birds are about the size of an adult thumb, really tiny. The scenery now is what I guess would be called desert scrubland as we are now in the Simpson Desert. It is fairly dense scrubland and with the backdrop of low hillocks or sand dunes is quite pretty. 

Then we arrived at our destination, a bush camp about 35 kms east of Kings Canyon. We parked about 100 mtrs from the road then our friends arrived and went right down the back about 500 mtrs from the road. After a walk by me and a drive in that direction we decided to go back to where we were. This is a nice camp with no facilities.