Jason phones home from the overlook.
We are going to spend the whole day at Purnululu. It is incredible. I feel like I've been transported to Narnia. There are rolling hills, green with low, scrubby brush, and trees scattered at random intervals, and big mountains behind.
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Large -- Medium Jason phones home from the overlook. |
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We drove to the Bungle-Bungle. The map said on the way we would see
Elephant
Rock. We wondered if several rocks were it, but then we rounded a bend, and OH,
THAT was it. It looked just like the heads of two elephants with their eyes and
trunks.
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Large -- Medium We hiked out toward Elephant Rock aways. |
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Large -- Medium Australian coins -- no idea why this image is here. |
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Large -- Medium There was this weird, organic chemistry stick figure plant all around there. It was totally cool. |
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Then we got to the Bungle-Bungle which looked like a bunch of big
beehives with
meter height black & orange stripes.
We walked a couple kilometers out to Cathedral Gorge. It wasn't tall &
narrow
like Echidna, but the beehives got slowly closer together untill all of a sudden
it opened into a large cavern, partly open at the top, but with lost of
overhanging rock and a pool at the bottom.
The pool was a nassty algae green ("pond water") and it stank. All around the pool and down the trail was pure white sand. WHat we couldn't figure out was how all the red sandstone broke down into white sand. THere was a bit of a ledge in the rock wall and we sat there and had PB&J for lunch.
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Large -- Medium Aerial tours of the area start at a small airport just about 10 miles away from the Bungle Bungle mountain range. Here's a chopper giving someone else a tour. |
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Large -- Medium A 5 meter boulder that fell from the side of the canyon above here. |
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Large -- Medium We walked over some cross-bedded sandstone. |
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Since we decided last night to stay here for another night, we went back to the Visitor CentRE to pay for the next night. We got cold Coke there and looked at the displays about the region's geology. We saw that away from all the roads was what they called the Piccaninny Circular Structure. Jason said, "That's usually code for impact crater." We pulled a book off the shelf to learn more about it, but all we found is that it IS a suspected impact crater, but no shocked quartz or other dead giveaways have been found. WE bought the book -- it also had some geologic history of the beehivees.
The next couple of hours we hung out on the cool porch of the visitor centeer, wrote some thank yous, read some, and relaxed.
Around 5pm we went back to the lookout where we'd watched the stars last night. WE met a nice couple in their 50's who, 7 months ago, quit thir stressful jobs, bought a "caravan" (ie, and RV) and have been traveling about the country.
When the sky again got dark, it was again incredible. What I noticed
this night
was the galaxy. It stretched all the way across the sky, and right in the
middle was the center of the galaxy. We could see dust lanes through the
galaxy, we learned several constellaations, and noticed that the colors of stars
were really obvious, ie, Alpha Centuari looked really yellow.
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Large -- Medium Gwen walks down from the overlook. |
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Large -- Medium We had the Australian couple take our picture. This one, however, is an autotimer shot, as you can see from the shadow on Gwen's shorts. |
