I seem to be stuck here in the centre of Australia 🙂
There are just so many places to go. Today, I went on part of the Red Centre Way into West MacDonnell National Park. Although the mountain ranges are not the tallest I’ve seen but they just went on forever. It was quite impressive.
On the way to my first stop, the Redbank Gorge; I saw what I thought was a control burn. In fact, it was a bush fire starting up. I drove right pass the fire and see it burning away. Stopped at a lookout about 5km out and spoke to a guy who’s been camping there for 2 nights. He said he saw a little camp fire a couple of nights ago and the people probably didn’t put it out properly when they left. He saw the fire started to spread this morning due to the wind this morning.
After chatted to the folk for a while, I went on to Redbank Gorge. It takes a 2km easy walk along the already dried river. Once you there, these sandstone walls are towering over you. In-between them, there is the gorge. I can tell you that the water was freezing because I went in for a swim. You can get a sense of how massive theses sandstones are from the second image, me dipping in the gorge, and the third image, the Redbank Gorge itself (That little bit of water near the bottom right hand corner is the pool I was dipping in). It was very breathtaking.
After spending about 1.5 hour at the gorge. My second and last destination was Ellery Creek Big Hole (the forth image). It was just as breathtaking as the Redbank As the name goes, the water pool is lot bigger than Redbank and you can swim in it as well. By the time I looked at the time, it was time to return to Alice. The time just seemed to disappear when being in places like these.
On the way back, the bush fire had worsen and I could hear helicopter was dumping water onto it. The fire made quite a devastation in a few short hours that I went by. Friends, I am sure you do already but do please make sure your camp fire is out before leaving the site when camping. 🙂
John (stuck) @ Alice Springs, NT
Images: 1. Bush Fire; 2. Dipping in Redbank Gorge; 3. Redbank Gorge; 4. Ellery Creek Big Hole
