Australia

Monday, March 3, 2014

Swimming at Ormiston

Keep Left!

Yesterday we caravaned with 5 other families (26 people in all!) to Ormiston Gorge, a well-known waterhole a couple of hours west of Alice. We all met just outside of town around 9am and hit the road! We have had quite a decent amount of rain over the last couple of months, and one of the Australian families we went with heard that Ormiston had more water than they had ever seen. Sure enough, we weren't disappointed!

Kids Spontaneously Posing on Rock Formation at Lookout

On the way to the gorge, we stopped at a couple of different viewpoints and admired how green everything was. It is quite amazing how green the desert can look after just a week of rain. But on the flip side, it goes brown quite fast also!

Beaux and Hannah

Jones and Jax

Jones with Puff

View of Mt. Sonder

From there we continued on until we arrived at Ormiston. There were several people there, and there was also a cafe there that happened to be open. This was our first time to the gorge, but the other people that we went with said that the cafe has never been open when they were here previously.

The first thing we did was a small hike that took us to the top of the gorge. It was quite beautiful to see everything from up there. There was a lot more water than we've seen anywhere before. It is amazing how the water changes the landscape!

Ormiston Gorge Lookout Point (Jax and Sam are there at the point waiting for us all to catch up..Zoom way in)

View of the Waterhole from Lookout above

View of Ormiston Campground from Lookout

Bottom Lookout Cage

Top Lookout Cage

Jones at the Gorge

Down the zig-zag stairs

All the water at Ormiston makes us want to visit all of our old haunts to see what they look like with a bit more water. After we came down from the top of the gorge, we grabbed all of our food and swimming gear and headed down for lunch and a swim. The kids all got in first thing while the grown-ups were getting lunch ready. Once everything was ready, the kids came flooding from the water to devour anything edible and then were quickly back to swimming.

One of the families we were with brought a kayak type of thing that the kids could sit on and paddle. There were a couple of inner tubes and a large amount of noodles! I had aspirations of setting up a rope swing from the massive gum tree right by our picnic area, so I went back to the car to fetch some rope I had brought for just an occasion! Unfortunately, I noticed a sign saying "No Rope Swings" on the way back, and being a national park, I decided I had better comply with the rules...

On one side of the waterhole, there was a cliff. The kids had floated over to it at one point and then started screaming about a snake that they had found that was alive! Of course, being in Australia, this got the attention of quite a few concerned parents, and so we went to investigate. Sure enough, there was a nice Python curled up on a rock. It was about 1.5" in diameter and we guess 3-4' long, although it was hard to tell since it was curled up.

Apparently one of the kids poked it with a noodle to see if it was alive, and it moved and that is when all the kids screamed. We impressed on our kids that, dead or alive, you should never be within a noodles length of a snake in Australia! We reminded them that the venomous snakes here can kill you in about 20 minutes without the right treatment! Pythons are not poisonous, so that is lucky. Fortunately, ours weren't the kids poking at the snake, not that we would want any of our other friends bitten either mind you!

The day was so beautiful and the water so nice, most of the grown-ups enjoyed the water for a time as well. There were warm spots and cold spots, but mostly the water was surprisingly chilly. It took my breath away the first time I got in! After everyone had their fill of swimming, we packed everything up and headed down the road a bit further to Glen Helen, which is a well-known station that now operates as a campground/hotel/restaurant. It was almost $25 to get five ice cream bars for our family! We stayed long enough at Glen Helen to eat our ice cream in a fly-free indoor area and then take a group picture before heading off once again.

After ice cream, two of the families headed back home while the rest of us scoped out some nearby camping spots for a trip we might do at the end of April with one of the families.

On the way back, we stopped at the Ochre Pits, which are basically stream beds that have walls of colored clay that the Aboriginal people used for painting their faces and bodies for rituals.

It's supposedly so significant to the indigenous that there is a $5,000 fine for taking any Ochre rocks from the area! Jones told us after the fact that he collected a pocket full of rocks from there, but we haven't investigated them to see if any were Ochre rocks or not... what's a parent to do?!!

White ochre is mostly kaolin clay, yellow ochre has a bit of iron mixed in, and red has lots of iron oxide

The drive home from there was uneventful. We did get to use our UHF (Australian) radio for the first time on the trip. The one Australian family we went with had a radio in their vehicle (as do we), so they led the caravan and we brought up the rear. Everyone else we've ever gone out bush with has been American with American radios (which are illegal here), so it was fun to finally be able to use ours and know that it works.

Two Mile Bushcamping Area - Finke River lined with River Gums

We got home at 7:30pm, got the kids in the shower, finished dinner at 8:30 and got the kids to bed by 9:00. Day like this are fun, but it is always nice to come home and rest with a nice cup of your own Starbucks coffee.

Good times,
Trent

Friday, January 31, 2014

N'Dhala Gorge

A couple of weekends ago found us heading out bush again, destination N'Dhala Gorge. This is the hottest time of year here, but this summer has definitely been wetter than last! Most of the rainy days still get up over 100 degrees, but the humidity climbs up around 80%, so it feels much hotter! We realized we were in for a cooler weekend, so decided to head out for some sight seeing. We called up a couple of friends to see if they could come with, but unfortunately no one was available.

Many of the rivers were threatening to flow on this particular weekend. The Ross River near N'Dhala Gorge has a permanent water hole (part of the river that has a billabong year round), so it was swollen and flowing a bit. We got to put the Disco's snorkel to use and attempt our first vehicular water crossing, as the track to the Gorge crosses the Ross River several times! The first crossing was the deepest - probably about 3 feet deep in the middle. Of course we didn't know how deep it was when we went in! There were some fresh tire tracks in the sand on either side of the billabong, so we figured that it must not be too tough of a crossing. With everyone (well the grown-ups anyway) holding their breath, we took the plunge! The only side effects were the nervous shakes and sigh of relief when we arrived on the other side! After a couple more smaller crossings, we made it to the gorge. There were several large "puddles" after the water crossings, and the kids love plowing through them and making huge, muddy rooster tails!

Just about the time we arrived at the gorge, the rain stopped and we were able to have a relatively nice hike (minus the flies). The gorge is home to over 6,000 Aboriginal petroglyphs, which they say are between 2,000-10,000 years old. We didn't see them all (surprise, surprise), but we did see our fill. Most of the art was either concentric circles, a fern looking plant, spider webs or stick figures. The current indigenous land owners say that the rock art in the gorge is associated with the story of the "great caterpillar" which has to do with the creation of the earth. I am glad they know, because it isn't like looking at hieroglyphics - it is very difficult to discern any meaning from Aboriginal pictographs or rock paintings. N'Dhala Gorge is a national park, and there are some campsites located at the entrance to the gorge. There is a trail that is maintained that takes you about 1.5km up the gorge and then stops. People are allowed to continue up the gorge (which we did for another half of a km), without a marked trail.

On the hike back to the carpark (Australian for parking lot), Jax and I decided to explore a cave that was way up on the wall of the gorge. It took us about 20 minutes to get up to it, and only about 10 to get down. A couple of places were rather treacherous, as the recent rains had made some of the rocks quite slippery! In the end we made it without incident, and we got a picture of Jax in the cave. There weren't any Aboriginal carvings or paintings in the cave. Jax and I guessed that it was because it would have been too hard for the indigenous people to have hiked up and down the rocks all the time if they lived in that cave! It was rather obvious however, that wallabies live in that cave, even though we didn't see any.

We did see some other wildlife. Jones touched the tail of a long-nosed dragon (they let people get surprisingly close, but they can bite). Jax and I saw some kind of skink that looked like a legless lizard at first glance, but upon closer inspection we did see some minuscule legs! It just looked like a little shiny snake when we first saw it. Beaux, mama and Jones saw another lizard that they had never seen before, which they said was black and shiny - probably a skink of some kind. It was gone by the time Jax and I got back from the cave though.

The trip home was uneventful. We took some pictures of some phenomenal geology on the way out - swirling and meandering layers of different kinds of rocks and gravel. As usual after a day of being out bush and hiking, we were happy to come home and kick off our shoes to enjoy one of Hilary's delicious home-cooked meals. It doesn't get much better than that!

Trent