12 July - Finke Gorge National Park

12 July 2016 – 178 579

Finke Gorge National Park

Peaceful start to the morning.  After breakfast we phoned an autoelectrician in Alice Springs and booked the van in for Thursday morning to be repaired.  After paying for another nights accommodation we headed out to Finke Gorge National Park for the day.
https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-reserves/find-a-park-to-visit/finke-gorge-national-park
The road is high clearance 4WD only – while we did not need to engage 4WD we definitely needed the high clearance and to take it very slowly.  The 16km took 90 minutes each way.  We also saw evidence of cars that had not “cleared” the rocks. 

The first walk we did was the Mpaara walk which goes up through a gully and comes out on top to an unexpectedly amazing view, while telling a dreamtime story of a boy that wanders off in the wilderness.  This took about two and a quarter hours to cover 6.5km and was a challenging walk.  We all voted this the best walk so far of the trip. 

After lunch we headed into Palm Valley.  We drove to about 1.5km before Palm Valley and left the car here as the road became very very rocky and it was just as quick to walk.  We did the Mpulungkinya walk which took as along the river bed through Palm Valley with the amazingly tall Cabbage Palms and beautiful cycads.  This walk (including the walk to and from where we parked the car) was 7.85km and took two and half hours.  There was an area of rock that looked almost like bark on a tree in both texture and colour, and directly beside was other rock that looked a lot like concrete.  The walls of the gorge were predominantly red-brown, however the sand in the river bed was light grey in colour.  Hayden found some cool tracks of a tiny two legged marsupial, a snake and a two legged marsupial with a tail in the sand. We got back to the van about 5:30pm, having left at 9:00am, and were treated to a beautiful sunset. Mum