While perhaps not as spectacular as Uluru and Kata Tjuta, the last week for me really encapsulated the joy of this trip. We saw some amazing landscapes off the main tourist trail. Not that we were pioneers - there are well established campsites at all these places but they are generally spacious, frequented by campers taking a slower pace, people who are really able to go off-road. So you end up having a fairly personal experience.
King's Canyon of course is well known and for good reason. The rim walk is fun with lots of scrambling over rocky outcrops, dramatic cliff views, little wooden bridges and a lovely waterhole. We stayed at a little campsite half an hour from the Canyon and the only fly in the ointment was a rather dramatic midnight interaction with a couple of dingoes on the way back from a loo trip! Ok, ok there were lots of flies, everywhere.
Palm Valley turned out to be a real highlight. It was 4WD fun. Yes, really fun even for me. Red cliffs, multiple river crossings and lush vegetation. The car got super muddy on the track over from Kings Canyon. A dirt road lined with seemingly thousands of brumbys, a few camels and the odd donkey.
The increasingly tropical plants as we approached the centre of Cycad Gorge were quite strange in the middle of the desert. The cycads are a remarkable remnant from a wetter, prehistoric climate. There are tall palm trees throughout the valley, the seeds for which are believed to have been imported by birds thousands of years ago. The closest natural planting of palms is over 1000km from this site so this is a truly remarkable microclimate.
To top all that off there was a lovely little campground by the river. The surrounding cliffs and rocky hillsides lit dramatically at sunset. Our campsite is about 10-15m to the right of this photo.
There were maybe 10 other couples there, almost all retirees missing their grandchildren/nieces/nephews and delighted by our children. The kids decided a rock platform in the river was a perfect stage and handed out "tickets" to the whole campsite, the majority of whom dutifully came down for their riverside "performance". One young man confessed it was his birthday so we cooked up a big chocolate pudding on the fire and sang "Happy birthday" with this bunch of strangers.
We did a hot, fly-ridden walk that rewarded us with this spectacular view on the way out of Palm Valley, back along the Finke River.
Then we stayed at Redbank Gorge. Another lucky find. There is a 1.2km walk along the dry riverbed which becomes more and more narrow and rocky so that the last several hundred metres or so you are scrambling over large boulders. Then there is a large, deep, icy cold pool of water leading to a narrow chasm. We swam, shivering, across that pool and hauled ourselves up into the chasm only to find that the steep, pale, smooth quartz cliffs held another freezing pool of water and then a third too small to swim in. We didn't have our waterproof camera with us so if you're interested you'll have to google it! I just did though and none of the photos really capture it.
We paused at several other places including Glen Helen Gorge, Ormiston Gorge and the ochre pits all of which were beautiful and interesting but less striking than the experiences above. Lastly we had to stop at Simpson's Gap. It's a beautiful place anyway but I had a particular motivation in that I wanted to recreate a photo that has been a mantlepiece fave in our family:
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