What nature has created here, over millions of years, is one of the most wonderful landscapes I have seen in Australia.
We arrived at Sandstone Park, a camping area free of the usual ammenities, porta- loos only, just before sunset.
Sandstone Park is a grassy plateau where the choice of a camping spot is only marked by a few stakes in the ground and scattered fire pits. From there a 360 degree view of the Gorge and the Great Dividing Range gives the feeling of being on nature’s stage. Once we were set up, the sandstone cliffs took on a pinkish-purple colour in the setting sun.
Our closest neighbours were 20 metres to either side. We were soon invited, after Austin more or less invited himself, to join Peter, Robyn, Sharon and Barry around a cosy fire.
The next morning we took off on the main walking track which extends 19 km into the gorge.
We decided to walk 15km of it, which included 4 side tracks, many, many steps up and down and 6 river crossings, all very well maintained.
If the main track was already delivering amazing views, the attractions of the side excursions were breathtaking: there was Moss Valley with waterfall and moss-covered rocks, Ward’s canyon full of fern trees and the unique to this area King Ferns.
The Amphitheatre, only accessible via steep ladders and the Art Gallery, one of the many sites of Aboriginal Art in this National Park.`
The amphitheatre only revealed itself after walking through a deep rock crevice. Suddenly we were surrounded by 60 metre cliffs in a circle of mere 15 metres in diameter.
Every one of these places had their own unique plant life and rock features.
The Art Gallery with its Aboriginal stencilling.
The Carnarvon Gorge landscape looks like something from "Jurassic Park”. After all, in between the huge gum trees and fan palms are cycads which existed in abundance in Triassic and Jurassic times.
During a nature talk we attended in the evening we learned that the white seed within the cycad's brightly orange flowers are full of cyanide.
Kangaroos and wallabies like to eat these flowers, but are clever enough to just nibble away the petals and drop the seed, thus hopefully planting a new tree. These cycads take a few hundred years to grow to a decent size.
Among the dainty Australian bush flowers we found native hibiscus and the white finger orchid.
We would have liked to do a guided night walk to see the yellow bellied gliders, owls and echidnas, but temperatures dropped again to 1 degree, and once Austin got the fire going it was too hard for us wimps to move away.