When we finally ventured out, I cooked up some bacon and eggs and toast for everyone and was soon warm.
We all headed out to Glen Helen gorge and were greeted with another amazing backdrop with some beautiful water flowing through the bottom. This was only a 5 minute walk from where we parked the car and was the backyard for the caravan park here. We are so glad we are staying up the road, even without power or running water. Way too cramped here.
We then drove further east to Ormiston Gorge. This had a 20 minute walk to the water hole, or a 3-4 hour loop walk through the mountains and gorge, returning via the water hole. Despite my body signalling in every possible way to take the short walk, we all “agreed” to take the loop.
This meandered up the side of the mountains and just went on forever. The views were spectacular, but I am not sure any of the photos I took will ever highlight the enormous size of this vertical cliff faces.
The terrain was forever changing. One minute we were in arid land dodging spikey grasses and red dust all over our shoes, next we were walking through sand and pebbles along the river beds, followed by great big boulders, all of which were changing colours every time we reached a new part of the river bed.
We had reached what we thought was about halfway (according to my Apple Watch) when my knee started hurting and progressively got worse. Turns out that either the description of the walk being only 7km is really wrong, or my watch doesn’t know how to calculate the hills and winding tracks, because my watch says we walked 11km. The last 2 km was extraordinarily difficult thanks to my inability to bend my right knee anymore... not very helpful clambering over boulders for 2 hours.
Finally we reached the car again and popped some pain killers ready for the night ahead and more walks tomorrow.
A bottle of red wine, a few bourbons and some schnitzels cooked over the fire finished off a great (but tiring day).
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