We are staying at The Mill in Quorn, and making various visits during the day. For reasons of utter stupidity, I left my camera in our room, and had to rely on the iPhone for photographs. So some are not great.
This is our first experience of cold for many days, and I think my body is quite confused. It is warm in the sun, but there is a really cold wind. I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a long-sleeved shirt on top, and then my fleece, and taking off and putting on clothes as required!
Our first visit was to the ruins of Kanyaka homestead, which was built in the late 1840s or early 1850s for a sheep farm, during a prolonged wet period of about 20 years. In the early 1860s, there were more than 40,000 sheep. Three quarters of the sheep died in the drought of 1867, and the farm had to be sold. It was never really successful after that as the area reverted to its normal dry state and the homestead was not used and gradually fell into disrepair.
Our next stop was the Yourambulla caves. It was a steep rocky climb to the caves, and the entire hillside was a haze of blue with the spring flowers, though this does not show up well on the pictures.
After 15 or 20 minutes we were high up on the hillside where there were amazing views over the surrounding countryside. The final climb to the main cave was up two long steep ladders. The cave itself was not so much a cave as an abri - just a sheltered rock overhang. The walls had been used for paintings about aboriginal initiation ceremonies, though without the explanation board, the painting would have been impossible for me to understand.
After that walk, we made a brief stop at the small town of Hawker to re-fuel. It reminded me of small African towns of my childhood, though I don't seem to have taken a picture that illustrates that very well!
The landscape outside the town is very scenic, with green trees and rolling hills on one side of the road, and towering rocky crags on the other. However, it is impossible to photograph properly from the fast moving bus. We saw quite a few kangaroos on the way to our next stop at Wilpena, but with no zoom my pictures are ridiculous. Our driver took some better ones.
Once we arrived, we were lucky enough to see a father emu with babies, the babies like little fluffy mint humbugs. (This is our driver's picture as well).
I did manage some pictures of them, though it took time and patience to avoid 12 other people determined to photograph them too. They got stuck on a little traffic island which had a fence round most of it, which the father emu jumped and the babies couldn't. It took some time to herd the babies to a gap they could get through to be re-united with dad. (Apparently, emus are like cassowary, dad does the childminding while the flighty mum goes off to have a more interesting life!)
As we lunched, the rain started, but we were using a lunch stop that was properly set up, with a roof, sink, heated barbecue, table and benches, so we stayed more or less dry. After lunch, we drove off to the start of a 2 1/2 hour walk to Wilpena Pound. We drove down a narrow road along a creek, with some very big old gum trees. At the start of the drive, higher up the hill, some of the trees were so old they were hollow and in one a little kangaroo was sheltering from the rain, looking quite damp and peering out disconsolately through the curtains of rain.
At that point, I decided not to walk, so I lent Paul my rain poncho as he was quite keen to walk, along with about half of our fellow travellers. The remaining 6 of us stayed in the bus. It was not long before some of the walkers, looking very wet, were back, and we were soon joined by the rest. Those who had stayed out longest had gone only as far as the first lookout, and had looked out on nothing except mist and rain, before giving up and returning. Nobody had made it as far as Wilpena Pound, which is a geological feature that apparently looks much like a meteor crater. Most people who had started the walk were too wet to care.
We drove back to the Mill, peering occasionally at the landscape through the rain. We had biscuits and hot chocolate, and watched a DVD while the rain hammered down outside. Sometimes it was so loud it was hard to hear the film. Nobody is particularly looking forward to tomorrow's 2 1/2 hour walk unless the rain stops.
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