Adventures at Watarrka (Kings Canyon)

Back again! I've had a good night's sleep, the sun is shining, and although it's ridiculously cold here (currently it's a balmy 11C, now I know that's pretty warm by Canadian standards, but I've spent the last 6 weeks in 30+ temperatures, so it's DARN COLD), I'm ready to tackle the last part of Jen's and my adventures in the Red Centre - namely, at Kings Canyon.

I left off last night with us tumbling into bed the night of Thursday, March 27th, after having hiked about 19kms around Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Needless to say, we slept in as late as we could on Friday morning. It felt GREAT. However, we'd had to move from our cozy family room (since Mom and Dad had left us to fly home) and into the 20-person dorm - and although the other girls were quiet, when you have 20 different alarm clocks going off, among other things, it's hard to do some quality sleeping in.

After checking out and enjoying a lazy breakfast, we got back on the rode and drove to Watarrka National Park, which is better known as Kings Canyon. It's about 500kms from Uluru, so it took us a while to get there. The scenery was more of the same - mulga scrub, red sand, rocks, flat landscape - so the drive itself was more boring than anything. That is, until we began to notice some rather odd vegetation growing on the sides of the road. We were traveling at pretty high speeds, but I swear it looked for all the world like someone had gone along and spilled buckets of tennis balls at the sides of the road! Curious, we slowed down as we approached the next pile of "balls", and stopped to take a look. Turns out that what we were seeing were these melon-like fruits, growing on vines along the ground. But the fruits were the exact size and colour of a tennis ball. Strange!

When we arrived at the Kings Canyon resort, we had a bit of trouble checking in, as the receptionist wasn't interested in giving us our YHA discount (which was advertized in the resort's brochure and also in the YHA booklet we had). We did get that all sorted out, and eventually got a key and were on our way. I would like to point out that this resort is owned by the same company as the resort we stayed in at Uluru, so now Jen and I have complaints about both places. YHA's gonna get a bit of an earful from us! Our room, once we found it, was pretty cool - there were three single beds and a double, as well as (gasp) a TV and our own fridge. Clearly it was meant to be a family room, but the resort was mostly empty so we were pretty sure we wouldn't be sharing it with anyone during our stay. COOL! The one odd thing about the room was that all the beds were on casters and the floor was tile. Presumably this made the beds easy to move around for cleaning purposes, but it also meant that every time you so much as turned over in bed, the whole darn thing would roll! We got pretty creative with shoving things under the wheels so our beds would stay put.

There was only a teeny tiny convenience store at the resort, so when we went to see if we could pick up a few more groceries, we nearly passed out when we saw the prices! (You need to understand that the NEXT-closest store was over 250kms away, so it wasn't like we had a lot of options.) No bread or other goodies for us. Thank goodness we'd bought a bunch of pasta earlier in the trip and hadn't eaten it yet. It sure came in handy! The communal kitchen at this resort was completely empty - no pots, pans, or anything. Turns out we had to rent a cooking kit ($50 deposit, rental fee of $5). At least this meant that we had our OWN pots, dishes, bowls, and cups which we didn't have to share!

Cooking dinner still turned out to be a bit of an adventure. The stove in the kitchen was gas, but had no igniter on it - we had to light it with a match. Not that we had any matches; instead, we ended up trying with a lighter. When that didn't work, Jen got a piece of paper, lit it on fire, and then tried to light the stove. In the end the problem turned out to be that only one out of the four elements worked, which explained some of our problems. GAR!

Once we'd finally managed to cook some dinner, we packed up all our equipment and went to head to our room so we could enjoy (wonder of wonders!) dinner in front of the TV. (Among other things, there was absolutely nowhere to sit in the kitchen.) But when Jen stuck her head out to take the first load of stuff back to the room, she came back in again immediately and said, in a deceptively calm voice, "Becky, there's a dingo outside." Dingo? Yep, there was a dingo roaming around the campground! Now, we'd seen the "Beware of Dingoes" signs that were posted around the resort, but we'd figured this was somewhat like the "Don't feed the bears" signs in Algonquin - everyone understands there were bears in the area, but you're not likely to ever see one, especially if you're careful with your food/garbage. Not so much here! The dingoes were quite comfortable in the campground, and roamed around pretty much everywhere! We waited for the dingo to wander off before zipping back down to our room. We spent the rest of the evening watching TV, which was a real treat for me - I'd been on the road for 5 weeks now and hadn't even seen the news!

(I mean, really! Dingoes may look like skinny ginger-coloured dogs, but they are apparently a subspecies of wolf, and they ARE wild. We didn't want to mess with one. Craziness! After that sighting, we saw the dingoes fairly regularly around the resort - seemed they'd case the place every couple of hours to see if anyone had dropped some food. It wasn't really a problem, once we got used to them - we just made sure to keep our room's door closed, and looked both ways before heading out to the bathroom. We were never approached by one at the resort.)

Saturday we decided to tackle the challenging Kings Canyon Rim Walk, which is a 9km track around the top of the canyon. Kings Canyon is basically a giant crack between two ancient hills, so we had to climb UP to get to the top of the canyon. The first 100m's or so were basically straight up a cliff, using a narrow stairway of field rocks. The cliff face we were climbing was very, very steep - you sure didn't want to look down or lean backwards while climbing! There was a good resting ledge about a third of the way to the top; while catching my breath there I reflected that I was sure glad I wasn't doing this hike with a canoe on my head! The trail was so steep we couldn't see the top of it until we were almost there; each time we reached what we thought was the top, it would turn out to be just a ledge. Once we did reach the top, though, the view was stunning.

The Rim Walk is a pretty dangerous one, and there were all sorts of warning signs at the start of the trail to tell us about the risks. Heat stroke was one possibility; fortunately for us it was only about 27C and not warm enough for that to be a real danger. (Well, that and we know about the importance of drinking enough water and not over-exerting ourselves in the heat of the day.) The canyon's walls are riddled with deep crevasses, so we were warned to stay on the marked trail and not to take shortcuts. Apparently each year tourists die here because they get too close to the edge, their hat blows off, and when they reflexively reach out to grab it, they fall off the cliff. We knew that wasn't going to be a problem, since (a) Ruth and Carroll have taught us about cliff safety and we don't go any closer than two body lengths to the edge, and (b) our bug nets were firmly over our heads, and our hats were inside! If the hats did blow off, they weren't going anywhere. :-)

The walk along the top of the canyon was fascinating - it used to be part of an ancient sea bed so there were places where we were walking over fossilized ripples. The walk took us through this maze of weathered rock domes. Apparently these were ancient sand dunes, which had compressed back into rock. So cool! As we walked along, we encountered another dingo! This one seemed rather more interested in us than any of the ones from the resort. It approached us while we were taking pictures at one of the lookouts... not close, but close enough to be uncomfortable for us. We just slowly backed off and walked away. For a while it looked like it was going to follow us, but then it changed its mind and trotted off in the opposite direction. Jen and I both breathed a sigh of relief. Being harassed by a dingo while at the resort is one thing - at least there are other people around to call to for help - but we were on our own at the top of the canyon!

At the very back of the canyon, we had to descend some stairs to cross to the other side, and there the pathway branched. We followed the path which took us down to the canyon floor, to a secluded water hole called (appropriately) the Garden of Eden. It was so beautiful! Unfortunately we hadn't known that we'd be able to swim here, or we would have brought our bathing suits with us. We had to settle for soaking our feet in the cold, crisp water. It felt wonderful.

Once we were rested and refreshed, we had to struggle our way back up the stairs (which I quickly named the Stairs From Hell, since there were many of them and they were so narrow you couldn't even get your whole foot on them at a time, yikes!), and back to the top of the canyon on the far side from where we'd spent the morning. We continued around the rim and back towards the car park. Just before we descended to the parking lot, we encountered a trail marker that looked like it was leading us straight off the edge of a cliff! Ha ha! I took a picture of it. Turns out this was more optical illusion than anything; when we got closer, we realized that the trail did go downhill, but it was a perfectly fine slope. You just couldn't see this at all from more than 3 feet away.

Back at the resort, our plan for the rest of the afternoon was to do a load of laundry and spend some time soaking ourselves in the pool. Well, the laundry turned out to be a bit of a challenge. One of the washing machines in our block of rooms was out of order, and when we tried to use the other one, it ate our money but didn't turn on! We ended up having to go to reception, get more money from them, and then wander around the rest of the resort looking for a machine that worked. There were four toilet blocks in all spread throughout the dorms/campgrounds, and it wasn't until we got to the very last one that we found a machine that worked. GAH. Thank goodness the resort was mostly empty! What do these people do when the place is full?

On Sunday, we slept in (we were a wee bit tired) and then drove to the far side of the Park to do the Kathleen Springs walk. This walk was MUCH easier than the rim walk, but not nearly as pretty. It took us down a meandering path to a permanent water hole, and along the way were signs explaining the pastoral history of the area, and how at one point this water hole had been used to water cattle. There were huge flocks of zebra finches in the trees; they're so cute! They'd flush from the trees as we approached and fly further down the pathway, cheeping all the way, and settle in a new tree. This process was repeated over and over again as we continued down the path. Whey they didn't just fly off at a right angle to the path is beyond me, but the birds were so charming I didn't mind. We also startled a fairly large goanna at the water hole - it scampered off into the rocks but came out again once we'd been quiet for a few minutes. And on our way back to the car, we spotted this enormous open honeycomb, just dangling from one of the trees!

The Kathleen Springs walk was short, so we decided to also tackle at least a part of the Giles Track. This is a 22km walk that actually starts back at the Canyon and ends at Kathleen Springs. There was no way we wanted to do the whole thing, but we figured if we walked for two hours into the trail, we could then turn around and walk back out to the car again. And that's pretty much what we did. We figure we walked about 4kms along the trail before turning around. Again, the scenery wasn't all that spectacular. We did climb one low rise and had a good (but brief) view of the surrounding area, but the rest of the walk was just a scramble over loose rocks, through scrub, and not much to see. Besides, by this point Jen and I were pretty pooped and we decided not to go any further. So once again we headed back to the resort, soaked ourselves in the pool, ordered pizza for dinner, and went to bed!

And now you've been brought up to speed. On the Monday we drove out for Coober Pedy, and I've already shared those adventures with you. Ta da!

Back in the present day - this afternoon Jen and I are leading a games training for some of the local Guiders, and tomorrow I'm off to the gold-rush town of Ballarat to meet another Guider - it'll be a busy few days!