Arkaroola Scenery Cam and Dan along the Ochre Wall

Roasting marshmallows

Escarpment

25th, 26th, 27th May, 2009
I’m sitting by the banks of an old dry river bed sipping on a chardonnay after a long day of hiking and 4WD’ing. How lucky am I? We are at Arkaroola in the Gammon Ranges which is part of the Flinders Ranges in SA. The place is beautiful. We are camping on the banks of a dried river bed, so we’re hoping it won’t rain. If it does, we’ll be flooded out – like we were warned!

We arrived Monday, set up camp and had a lazy late afternoon building the fire and just settling in.

Tuesday, we went for a drive and hiked through the gorges. Magnificent! - every hill we drove up or corner we came around opened up to another fabulous vista. This was also Steve’s first opportunity to do some 4WD’ing, although not hard-core in any way, it was a lot of fun.

A lot of people told us we must see the Flinders Ranges, but we were always willing to forego them. We’re so glad now that we didn’t. The boys are doing so much hiking and exploring we hardly see them all day. By the time it’s bed-time there are no complaints just very tired faces.

Wednesday – we are sitting around camp doing a bit of housekeeping. Steve has the chainsaw out and is getting ready for tonight’s fire. John and Kay have arrived in Arkaroola as well, so they will join us tonight for the fire.

Cameron, Ned and Harry went for what we thought was a little bush walk. An hour later we looked up and they were at the top of the mountain where we are camped. What an adventure. I suppose Cam took our constant suggestions of going off for an explore a little toooooo far, but he had a ball. The boys we are camping with are real adventurers, and Cam is having a great time just going off with them and searching our environment. He seems to be finding an independence in him that either we didn’t allow before or he didn’t know he had – regardless, it fits him well.

Tomorrow we will leave here and start our journey up the Oodnadatta Track. We’ll stock up first at Leigh Creek, and see how far up we can get. Hopefully, the weather will start to warm up a bit more the further north we travel. Last night in particular was freezing, with it being 2 degrees when we woke up at 8:00am.