Kings Canyon

We're still a long way from Alice Springs.  It can be hard to get our heads around just how big our wonderful country is.  Yulara/Uluru is about 450km from Alice Springs, Kings Canyon is about 300km from Yulara and 350km from Alice Springs.  It can take quite a long time to travel fairly short distances if the roads are unsealed.

We're definitely in WOW country at Kings Canyon.  The magnificent landform began life many millions of years ao as a hairline crack in the rock that allowed water to seep in to begin the erosion process.







We've had great weather - hot during the day and cool overnight.  At around 6C, some mornings have been cold before the sun starts to warm things up again.  Like Uluru and the Kata Tjuta, the red rocks of Kings Canyon simply glow at sunset and like many other tourists we took plenty of photos.

We're spending 2 nights here so have a whole day to explore.  We've decided to do a couple of walks in the cool of the morning.  The Kings Creek walk takes about an hour and we walked alongside the Kings Creek riverbed into the canyon.  There are plenty of birds around and we can hear plenty of them as we walk along.

Our next walk was to Kathleen Springs, a permanent water source.  The landscape here was quite different and we walked through a flat plain through the canyon neck to the spring.  There were yellow everlastings and yellow and white paper daisies everywhere.

The gall wasps have been busy and their ball-like galls hung from trees like dark brown christmas decorations.

In the evening we took some more sunset photos and also saw some Sturt's Desert Peas in flower - we didn't see any in South Australia, but have seen some here in the Northern Territory.  






We sat outside and dined with some neighbouring campers.  The local dingo population was busy roaming the campground stealing any unwatched food.  We were told that they will steal any shoes left outside as well.





We left the beauty of Kings Canyon and the Watarrka National Park to travel along the scenic loop road through the West MacDonnell Ranges to Alice Springs.  We bought our permit to travel through Aboriginal land at the Kings Canyon service station - cost $5.50 - and set off.





We stopped at Morris Pass Lookout and then we hit the unsealed road. This was probably the roughest road we have travelled on, and we were on it for about 150km.  At times we were travelling at about 10kph.

Eventually we were back on the bitumen and travel was a lot more comfortable.  We're planning to do at least one day trip back into this spectacular country over the next couple of weeks.  Now we're back into civilisation at Alice Springs with shops, phone coverage, WiFi, TV and radio.