Namatjira

Date of Adventure 6 December 2024

This posting will be more about photos and less about all of the other crap.

On my way to Papunya (see the prior post) I decided to head out and camp in the West McDonnell National Park. Camping in Australian National Parks is an interesting proposition. In every case I’ve tried you have to get a permit. Permits are all obtained online, nothing in person. In some states the permit has a fixed cost, per person. In others you have to pay a nominal fee to get the permit but you can make it for any number of people and for up to 14 days, all for the one fee. In the Northern Territory (NT) permits seem to be $10 per night and you need a general park permit. My park permit from a week or so ago is still good so I was set. I applied for a permit at Redbank Gorge and it was approved. But the next day I got an email saying that campsite was closed due to weather damage. I moved it to the Finke River 2 mile campground.

I’m going to be messing around with maps to see if I can show y’all some of the travels. So here is a map of the drive that I took that day. I’ll have to figure out how to show important waypoints better than this but it’s a start.

I think that if you click on this link it will take you to the map in a way that you can expand sections.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1x3BZ0Rs2LHkA1F5-mSj8sp5QBxYp8eI&usp=sharing

Anyway, the drive out there was spectacular. It is a beautiful canyon. I don’t think it would be called a canyon down here but it’s a drive through part of the West McDonnell Range. These pictures don’t do it justice but here they are.

After figuring out where I’d be camping, I drove back a few km to Ormiston Gorge. This is a really beautiful site and I wished that I’d chosen it for camping. But it was way too late to change and I’d talked to some rangers earlier in the day so didn’t want to chance changing my campsite, unofficially.

At the outset there was no one around so I got in a little skinny dip to cool off. After getting back to my car a young couple drove in and headed down to the waterhole. But then it started raining pretty hard so I could just sit in one of their shelters and chill for a while. Eventually I went down the road to my permitted campsite for the night.

The next day I had to cross the Finke River. It was the deepest I’d done up to that point but nothing compared to the mud and water that I was heading towards.

I decided to leave the sound in on this clip. I’m still a novice ant managing video clips.