Roos and Emus

We survived the outback! I took the train over to Elizabeth to meet Tyler after work on Friday and we headed out to Mount Remarkable. He was pretty tired after waking up at like 530 AM for work so he let me drive - my first time on the other side of the road! Eek! It was definitely interesting. The turnabouts were a bit tricky going around counterclockwise and the passing on the right was certainly something different. My placement on the road was also like relearning all over again. I was always veering too far to the left since I was used to being more on the left side of the road.

Eventually we made it to the group campground we were staying at in Mount Remarkable National Park. We camped underneath red gum trees where kukaburras above us laughed - literally - at like 5 am in the morning! Then as Tyler was making breakfast, an emu circled us at about a 5 meter radius. Crazy! I attached a pic.

From there, we drove to the parking lot where we started our trek around the Flinders Ranges. It was a total of 18km and we did about 11 km the first day, camped overnight, and then did the last of the 7km the next day. We hiked along a ridge for about a 1/3 of the hike and then among the rocky cliffs below for another 1/3 and then along a creek for another 1/3. Emus hiked along with us too!

After several nights on the edge of the outback, we felt like pros at "bushwalking" (aka backpacking in the "bush" - aka outback) so we headed further deep into the outback. Along the way, we stopped for lunch at the Old Willows Brewery in Quorn. It was a cute little old homestead that even had lambs brains on the menu. Unfortunately neither Tyler or I wanted a full order of the mind of a sheep so neither of us were even able to try a bite. :( After lunch, we continued on down the road to Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges. A "pound" is a formation of a mountain range in the form of the circle or oval. Wilpena Pound specifically surrounds about a 20 square mile area. We camped in a campground right outside the pound and did a hike in to the pound on Monday (the Queen's birthday so Tyler had the day off). We were hoping to go up St. Mary's Peak which is the highest point in the Flinders Ranges but unfortunately the lady at the ranger center advised us to take a shorter path to a lookout instead - saying that we were too late for St. Mary's Peak and that it was too cloudy anyways and wasn't going to clear up all day. We did the little 7 mile hike she suggested instead but as we did it, the clouds blew out and it eventually became a super clear day. We were bummed that we listened to this older ranger who didn't even know how fast of hikers we were. BUT we did get to see lots of roos throughout our hike so that was pretty exciting! They were all over - just munching on the grass, kinda looking up when we passed but that's about all. We think we even saw a rock wallabye - which looks mostly like a roo but a little different. I was happy that we saw all these guys while hiking instead of while we were driving - that wouldn't have been fun for sure. After the 3 days of hiking, it was a 5 hour drive to get back to Adelaide for the 'fun' post-camping clean-up. (Again for all the pics - check out my picasa sight: http://picasaweb.google.com.au/annielb2000/20096FlindersRangesInSouthAustralia#)