14th September, 2014

Bright and early start to this morning to try and beat the heat again, 5:15 rise and shine, well for me anyway. We had breakfast and were on the trail by 7:00. This mornings walk took us along the Piccaninny Creek to Whipsnake Gorge with stop offs at Piccaninny Lookout and The Window.

When you walk you actually walk inside the creek, there is obviously no water left in it at this time of the year. You walk on sand, pebbles, small rocks and slabs of rock. The amount of erosion in the slabs of rock shows just how hard and fast the water must flow through here in the wet. Being out so early in the morning allowed us to see the Bungle Bungle in all it's glory (we could have been out earlier really), the sunlight is not as harsh, allowing contrasts in the rocks and trees and shadows to show up and still be visible. Not sure my photos will actually reflect that.

The Piccaninny Lookout allowed views across plains toward more of the Bungle Bungle and then back up the valley from where you had just walked.

The Window was, from our perspective, a non event. It was a piece of the Bungle Bungle with a hole in the middle of it, giving it the appearance of a window, if you were tall enough to look through it, maybe 9 foot tall.

Whipsnake Gorge was a magnificent deep gorge, you follow another creek bed up between two cliffs until you reach the end, where you are basically encompassed by the orange/red coloured stone of the Bungle Bungle. There were lots of dead Cane Toads in there and a couple of dried up water holes. In a way it was a smaller, less enclosed version of Cathedral Gorge.

The walk back retraced our steps to the car park, minus the lookout and the window.

When we started our walk it was 21 degrees on the cars gauge, we covered about 11 kilometres and when we got back it was 34 degrees at 10:00, good weight loss program.

Tomorrow we head south to Wolfe Creek Crater and then along the Tanami back to Alice Springs and then home by Friday week, the 26th of September, ready to start work on Monday the 28th, hooray.

Couple of stats before we head home.

Kilometres travelled - 11232

Average - 144 km per day

Average L/100 km - 19.87

Total Fuel Cost - $4179.69 or $53.59 per day

Average Price per Litre - $1.846 - Premium whenever we could get it

2265 Litres

Other expenditure - $9920 at $125.57 per day

Total nights - 77