Photo shows a green turtle at Osprey Bay on the Ningaloo coast, near Exmouth.

We are in the small coal mining town of Collie in another 'shoebox' room, primarily designed for mine workers, but open for travellers like us. Collie is south east of Perth amongst low hills. Both the Munda Biddi (cycling) and the Bibbulmun (hiking) trails pass through here on their way south, although this time we are doing neither and are on our slow way back towards the east coast of Australia after a side trip up to Exmouth and the Coral Coast.

Western Australia is a huge state. It stretches from the cool, temperate south coast right up to the Kimberley in the deep tropics. Having retrieved Matilda, the Merc., we headed north along the coast from Perth by passing kilometre after kilometre of white sand beaches, sand dunes and small coastal towns after eventually freeing ourselves from the remorselessly spreading northern suburbs of Perth.

In succession, we sampled the national parks of Nambung, Lesueur, Kalbarri and Francois Peron, each of which progressively got dryer and dryer. The eucalypt forests of the south became mulga, Banksia and Grevillea scrub and then low heathland. Each national park was uniquely different, Nambung with its limestone pinnacles, Lesueur with its swathes of wildflowers, Kalbarri , its Murchison River gorge and Francois Peron, perched between the tentacles of Shark Bay.



Photos taken between Perth and Shark Bay: from top row to bottom right:

Kalbarri NP: The Murchison River gorge
Kambung NP: the pinnacles, Francois Peron NP: Shark Bay
Wildflower in Lesueur NP, Murchison River in Kalbarri NP.


Ningaloo Reef is about 1,200 km north of Perth and just west of the little town of Exmouth which lies near the top of the Exmouth Gulf. Ningaloo is an unusual feature, being a fringing coral reef, unusual because it is on the western side of a major continental landmass and because nowhere else in Australia is there a coral reef attached to the mainland shoreline. The Great Barrier reefs on Queensland's coast lie at a distance from the mainland and although there are fringing reefs there, they are all attached to the sides of offshore islands.

Ningaloo is managed by WA's Parks and Wildlife department who have done a good job protecting the 250 km long reef from development and deterioration from visitor pressure. We were wondering how the coral communities here had fared compared to the coral reefs in Queensland, so we were glad to note that there was very little damage, although both the amount of coral and the diversity of marine life wasn't as great as many other reefs we have been to. Ningaloo is lucky in that it is not exposed to sediment from rivers, is located in a low rainfall area and there is no farming nearby, all of which mean the main danger is from offshore gas exploitation and climate change. The latter is a very real threat. Depending on how humanity faces up to its collective challenge at stabilising temperatures, Ningaloo is on track to irreversible damage because of bleaching episodes, expected to have reached a frequency that will not allow recovery by 2045. That goes for all other world reefs as well, of course.

Ningaloo is also known for its whale sharks, the world's largest, who like the humpback whales, come up this far north in the winter months. By August they have gone south again, so we didn't see either large whales or their fishy cousins. What we did see was a remarkable green turtle nesting occasion. We had seen turtles while snorkelling and many more looking into the lagoon while on the Ningaloo beaches, but one night, with clear skies and a full moon we ventured out from our campsite to search for turtles coming ashore to lay eggs. They prefer high tides and dark skies, so we started looking at about 9 pm just as the moon was rising. First we saw a turtle arrive on the shoreline, then as we walked slowly along the beach, nesting turtle after turtle became visible in our red torch lights. Most of them had already got to the egg laying stage, by which time they are oblivious to disturbance, but others were digging their nests and others still, laboriously making their way up the beach past the high tide mark.



Photos taken at Ningaloo Marine Park near Exmouth:

Geoff at Turquoise Bay
Lovely Ningaloo beach, amgel fish, butterfly fish
Trevally, lagoon coral bommie, bumphead parrot fish
Green turtle, Nesting turtle climbing the beach at night, flutemouth.


We are watching the unfolding flooding events in the eastern states, which have had a disproportionate effect on northern and eastern Victoria and outback NSW. We will be making our way back soon but will probably stick to a coastal route to avoid flooded highways and towns. The three climatic events that exacerbate flooding - La Niña, the negative phase of the Indian Dipole and the positive phase of the Southern Annular Modulation are all predicted to ease in the next few months, hopefully allowing the east to dry out and create a more normal pattern of weather next year.

Photo shows us at the southern terminus of the Munda Biddi cycle trail near the Visitor's Centre on the main street in the Albany CBD. The northern terminus is near the village of Mundaring, nearly 1,000 km away in the Perth Hills.

We are in the city of Albany, snug and warm in what the hotel calls a "shoebox room". We have completed the cycle trip from Perth, about 620 km in total and will soon bus it back to retrieve Matilda, the Merc. and then drive northwards to see old Darwin friends, Judy and Miles in Geraldton, and as far north as the Coral Coast at Ningaloo before retracing our steps back to the Gold Coast.

Our bike trip wasn't one of the longest we have ever done, but nonetheless satisfying and interesting. We rode straight out of Baldivis and headed to the coast south of Perth. By using the map and keeping an eye out we were able to keep to cycle paths and quiet roads for the most part as we headed down through busy Mandurah, then Bunbury, Busselton, Dunsborough, Margaret River and Augusta. The coastal ride was at first quite flat and wild flowers were everywhere, multicoloured daisies and orchids most conspicuous amongst hundreds of species we couldn't recognise.

The coast to the west of the small touristy town of Margaret River is the location for the 6 day Cape to Cape hike. We didn't have time for this as well as the Perth to Albany ride, but we did get to see both capes, poking out as they do, west and south towards the Southern Ocean. The sea was curiously calm and we were able to spot 5 humpback whales passing Cape Naturaliste as they made their way south towards Antarctica.

From Augusta, we headed east to the little town of Pemberton, surrounded by tall karri forest, unique to South West Australia, and followed the Munda Biddi cycle trail, or close to it, all the way to Albany on the south coast through a lot of forest, a lot of hills and the small villages of Northcliff, Walpole and Denmark.

Albany is West Australia's oldest town and the site of the first colonial capital in the west, but soon lost out to Fremantle and nearby Perth on the Swan River. It has a magnificent harbour in Princess Royal and the scenery to the west and east is spectacular, but we found the spring climate down here wet and cold and it wasn't often we saw sight of the sun. Alison caught up with her old Tavistock school chum here, Clodagh, who we last saw in Sydney in 1979(!). Clodagh was born in Australia, but her parents moved to Devon when she was young. She moved back to Oz when she could leave school and has brought up 5 kids, ran a professional photographic business and skippered her own racing yacht in the wild seas off the SW coast.



Munda Biddi trail marker



Through the karri forest



River Road bridge



The Munda Biddi trail snaking through the forest



Karri forest between Pemberton and Northcliff



Munda Biddi trail sign



Sheltering from the rain



Northcliff campsite



Cheeky grey currawong



Wildflowers along the trail



Trail junction



Carnaby’s black cockatoo



Peaceful Bay



Leafy sea dragon silo art on the Albany foreshore

Photo above shows pelicans lining up for a free feed from returning fishermen at the Elliston, SA, boat ramp.

We are as far south west as you can go in this huge continent before an ocean swim to South Africa or the Antarctic. We are camped in the small village of Augusta, near Cape Leeuwin, one of the two big capes (the other is Cape Naturaliste) that a boat must pass if it is to proceed from the west coast of Australia to the South coast or vice versa. We are not in Sundari, of course, but on bikes as part of our cycle trip from Perth to Albany via the south west coast and the Munda Biddi bike trail, which we start in Pemberton 110 km east of here. It is about 400 km along the trail between Pemberton and Albany, about 10 days cycling for us as long as nothing gets broken!

According to Google Maps we are 4,500 km from Brisbane and it certainly seems a long way. Taking advantage of a slight drop in the price of petrol we took off about 5 weeks ago, driving through southern Queensland, across NSW and SA, then across the vast treelessness of the Nullarbor Plain and finally into WA's wheat and gold mining belt between Kalgoorlie and the Perth Hills. Neither of us has visited WA since Geoff's 1975 (!) hitchhiking trip from Sydney to Perth on route from NZ to England.

Wherever we go it seems that there is always an ex yachtie that we know from years ago. Jen and Nick, ex Devon Gypsy, have lived near Rockingham, just south of Perth for many years. We met them on the 2008 Sail Indonesia Rally and subsequently in Rebak Marina, Malaysia. They have run their sprawling mansion as a B and B for the last few years, but with Jen's Mum now needing care, the B and B side of things has been put on hold. We stayed with them for a few days while planning our cycling trip, and also saw Jean and Alan, ex Tuatara, who dropped in after their shorter section of the Munda Biddi Trail.

Jean and Alan's home is in Hamilton, NZ, and this was their first overseas adventure since the start of the pandemic.

After completing the Albany section of the trail, we will rejoin Matilda, left at Jen and Nick's and drive up north first to Geraldton, where old friends Judy and Miles are still living on a yacht in the harbour, then possibly (dependent on how the fuel price creeps up) as far as Ningaloo Reef near Exmouth.

We have our kayaks with us (on Matilda) and hope to do some kayaking before making the long trek back to the Gold Coast where Sundari is berthed.

The weather down here has been cold and damp, more like an early spring in New Zealand. Hopefully, as the days go by it should warm up, although the forecast doesn't show much improvement for the next week. The arrival of La Nina number three back in the eastern states has been catastrophic, with Victoria, Tasmania and NSW being hardest hit by flooding, so we are probably better off on this side of the continent!



Sheringa Beach, SA



Silo art, SA



Southern right whale statue, small SA town. Southern rights migrate to the head of the Bight each winter to mate and give birth. We passed the Bight towards the end of the whale season and didn't see any, but did spot 5 returning humpbacks passing Cape Naturaliste in WA just a couple of days ago.



Point Labatt sea lion colony, SA. It's the largest breeding colony of sea lions on the Australian mainland.



Australian sea lions, Point Labatt breeding colony, SA.



Approaching the Nullarbor from the SA side.



Nullarbor shed



Warning sign - camels, roos, wombats. We didn't see any mammals at all across the Nullarbor.



Great Australian Bight cliffs, Nullarbor coast



Nullarbor coast looking west



Kalgoorlie gold mine




Small selection of spring wildflowers in SA and WA. The wildflowers were at their best when we arrived. Dazzling daisies, orchids as well as flowering shrubs and trees, especially Grevilleas, Banksias, gums, paperbarks and wattles.




Off on the bike trip!

Photo above shows a young male koala at Coombabah on the Gold Coast near Helensvale, one of five healthy koalas we came across on a recent visit to this remnant, protected patch of bush.

We are on our mooring in the Karragarra passage in the SMBI (South Moreton Bay Islands), nearer Karragarra Island on our South side than to Lamb Island to the North, where we have our slice of land. We have been hanging around while planning our next long trip to Western Australia next month.

The mooring location is quite comfortable as it is not exposed to the open sea and the longest fetch is less than a mile to the direct east or west. We have had a few nasty days, when the wind has piped up or it has drizzled, but mostly the days have been pleasant with warm, sunny days after cool nights and mornings.



The Karragarra Passage looking westwards from above Rosie and Mike's place on Lamb Island. Karragarra island is across the passage. Tambourine Mountain, in the Gold Coast hinterland, is in the distance at the far left.

Because we are physically closer to Karragarra, the smallest of the SMBI islands, we awake to the discordant morning symphony of thousands of island birds, with kookaburras normally the first to wake us up. When the nights are still, we can hear the weird wail of the bush curlews and the call of the boobook (NZ: morepork) owl, coming from the western end of the island.



Karragarra's beach near the BBQs and ferry landing.



Lamb's only beach has a picnic spot and a view across the sand banks to Minjerribah/ North Stradbroke.



The old dam on Lamb Island, close to where our shed is located, is overflowing after two seasons of more than average rain. It has attracted a breeding colony of sacred ibises, several maned ducks, shags and an egret or two.

Karragarra is probably the nicest of the four closely knit SMBI islands as it has a public reserve along the entire northern coast, closest to us, as well as fewer inhabitants and car traffic on its few roads.

Karragarra and Macleay Islands both have user friendly beaches, but Lamb and Russell's beaches are more mangrovy and muddy. Lamb Island is also home to many birds and we have a butcher bird and a family of bush curlews who have taken up residence on our plot. The most common birds here are noisy friar birds, corellas, sulphur crested cockatoos, galahs, rainbow lorikeets, butcher birds, magpies, magpie larks, brown and blue faced honey eaters, drongos, kookaburras, sacred ibises, lapwing plovers, egrets and herons, ducks, whistling and Brahminy kites, and white breasted sea eagles.

Swallows are everywhere swooping around and trying unsuccessfuly to make a nest in Sundari's boom bag. Pelicans, shags and terns fly in to the passage when the tinnies are out catching prawns at either end of the passage. The occasional pod of dolphins, a dugong or turtle, pass by Sundari, but normally avoid this passage because of the ferry traffic.



Two bush stone curlews who have taken to hang around our plot on Lamb Island.



Signs try and slow down the islands' motorists as the mostly nocturnal bush curlews are sleepy in the day time.



An intermediate egret at Lamb Island's dam. This species seems to be the most common of SMBI's herons.



A pair of rainbow lorikeets setting up their nest in a hole in a paperbark tree on Lamb Island.




As regular as clockwork, kookaburras, like this one on Karragarra, wake us up in the early morning.

Since we have been back on our mooring we have been to and fro from the "Boat Shed" carrying stuff and erecting a water catching system comprised of a gutter and water tank. This is so we don't have to rely on mains water, which we can't get until we submit house building plans. We also have a flourishing compost bin going to help nourish the fruit trees we will plant when we get back from our adventures in WA.

Redlands is koala territory, or perhaps more correctly, was koala territory. It had the right mix of favourite gum trees that koalas like and even just twenty years ago was probably home to tens of thousands of wild koalas.

Koalas are now listed as endangered in both Queensland and NSW for different reasons. In NSW, the bushfires and land clearance (aka deforestation) has killed many thousands of koalas and destroyed significant amounts of habitat. In Queensland, it is the scale of urban development, especially around greater Brisbane, that has decimated koala numbers. Many fragments of suitable habitat remain protected, but young koalas by necessity must move out of the place they were born in because of territorial prerogatives.

The bush fragments are crisscrossed by major roads with increasing levels of traffic. All the koala signs in the world cannot protect wandering young koalas from being killed as they cross these rivers of death. We have explored many of Redlands' bush fragments in vain, but at last struck the jackpot when we returned to the Coombabah wetlands in the Gold Coast not far from Helensvale. We came across five koalas in quick succession on a lovely, sunny, but cool late winter weekend. They all seemed healthy and responsive and it was nice to see the pleasure that the weekend walkers had when seeing them, for some the first time.



The little village of Dunwich on Minjerribah, here seen from Lamb Island's northern shore. North Stradbroke / Minjerribah has a thriving koala population, distinct from the Redlands mainland. No-one seems to be sure how they got on to this huge sand island, but they may represent a significantly important refuge as the mainland koala population dwindles.



These calls to action on climate change have popped up on the SMBI islands recently. It's not exactly a very progressive population here, but the fact that the signs haven't been vandalised or torn down suggests a new era. Climate change has certainly not just affceted many of Australia's unique creatures but increasing numbers of its citizens, too.

Photo shows an aerial view of Lakes Jennings through to Boomanjin in the central southern part of Fraser Island / K'gari. (not our photo!)

We are back on Sundari and preparing to leave Raby Bay, probably initially at least to swing on our own mooring while we plan our next adventure. We have returned from a whistlestop trip to Bundy to get our rusting anchor galvanised and spend 6 days walking around the Southern Lakes of K'gari / Fraser Island. More about this hike a little later, but we will now address the title of this blog: the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of our gas guzzling camper car, the venerable "Matilda".

We had left Matilda parked just up from the Fraser barge ramp, assuming that was a safe place to leave it. Or not! On our return 6 days later, we were flummoxed to find that Matilda had vanished! Bummer! Had Matilda waltzed away all on its own, or was it due to foul play? Fortunately, especially because Riverheads, the suburb at the mouth of the Mary River where the ferry to Fraser is located, has no public transport link to anywhere else, we have friends in the form of Brian and Jill, ex SV Destiny and SV Maxed Out, who have swallowed the anchor(s) and are residents of the nearby sprawling suburban metropolis of Hervey Bay. Brian picked us up and we were told to stay in their town house as long as we needed to sort ourselves out. Matilda not only was our home away from home in the form of a comfortable bed, and all basic camping stuff, but our computers and a newly galvanised anchor, too, meaning we were facing a substantial loss in uninsured assets.

A trip to the local plods to make a stolen car report was followed by a post on the local community Facebook site. Courtesy of other yachties stranded up in Cairns we had use of their little car, nicknamed "Button". Within a half an hour, a guy called Tony messaged us to say that he had spotted Matilda lounging around near his home. Yay! Things got a little weird when we met up with Tony in an affluent part of Hervey Bay. Matilda had been stripped of just about everything inside, but Tony said he had met up with a woman who had claimed to have bought the car for $800. When she was told that the car was stolen property, she had promptly disappeared. The cops turned up and for once seemed quite human. The car was even subject to fingerprint and DNA forensic analysis. We at least had our wheels back - running around Australia is unfortunately pretty difficult without a car.

Thanks to Brian and Jill for all their help as well as the very sympathetic community on the Facebook site who deluged the thread with helpful comments and support.



Backpacks on again for our 60 km version of the Fraser Island Great Walk

Now for the hike around the Southern dune lakes of K'gari. This is a walk which is hard to do from the boat as leaving it anchored in the Sandy Strait is always a worrying prospect. We have hiked it up to Lake McKenzie a couple of times before, but have always returned the same day.

K'gari has around 40 of these unique perched lakes, isolated freshwater lakes formed by depressions in the sandy floor of the island which have filled up with rainwater. They are all quite stunning, with shallow, clear water surrounded by blindingly white silica sand beaches. The walking tracks link up the lakes and the forest on K'gari, which alternates from wallum heath to Eucalyptus woodland and pockets of rainforest, all rather amazing considering that all this growth takes place on the sandy soil built up by sediment driven north in ocean currents from New South Wales.

We walked to and around 6 of these 40 lakes - Boorangoora (McKenzie), Basin, Jennings, Birrabeen, Benaroon and Boomanjin. Boomanjin was the largest of Fraser's lakes and the largest perched dune lake in the world, while Basin Lake was the smallest we visited.

We did the walk after 3 days of rain and the nights were long and cold in the tent, but the days warm with lovely clear blue skies. We still haven't had the time to see Fraser's wild east coast and the Valley of the Giants - where some of the huge forest giants missed by the early loggers still stand. Maybe another year!



Lake McKenzie - the most commonly visited of the 40 dune lakes on Fraser/K'gari.



Campsite at Lake Benaroon



Misty morning at Lake Benaroon



Wanggoolba Creek crossing at Central Station. The white colour is the sand beneath the crystal clear, but shallow creek



Lake Boomanjin - the world's largest perched dune lake.



Lake Boomanjin again - note the white silica beaches.



Sleepy dingo at the Wanggoolba ferry terminal.




The same dingo decided to inspect our packs while waiting for the ferry.



The ferry arriving at Wanggoolba Creek before the discovery of the missing Matilda.


With much of the Southern hemisphere in winter, the nasty virus has managed to cling on, mutate and make a come back, leaving health officals and politicians scratching their heads as to what to do. We are avoiding crowded places, wear masks when we can't and have had our second booster, but many of our friends or friends or relatives of friends have already had Covid. As some health experts have been saying, ignoring the disease doesn't actually make it go away, but we wish it would!

Rock country (photo above): Mount Conner on the way to Uluru (Ayer's Rock) and the Olgas (Kata Tjuta). Uluru and the Olgas are huge monoliths (rocks) but not the largest in Australia, which is Mount Augustus in WA. Still impressive.

We're back in Western Queensland on the way back to the boat after traversing the full length of the Northern Territory from Uluru / Kata Tjuta in the South to Darwin in the Top End. We squeezed in the long side trip to Uluru /Kata Tjuta after coming off the Larapinta Trail, then drove 1,000 km north to the thermal pools at Mataranka and into Nitmiluk / Katherine Gorge.



Birds seen between Alice and Katherine: by row, left to right:
Bee-eater, pink cockatoos, babbler,
Wedge-tailed eagle, corellas, willy wagtail,
Budgies, spinifex pigeon, emu.

The temperatures for the 6 day Jatbula Trail hike were decidedly unpromising, with maxima in the Gorge and nearby Katherine township forecast to be 36 to 37oC. No doubt it would have been a few more degrees higher on the exposed tableland where the first few days of the trail crosses, but we shouldered our backpacks once again, crossed the Gorge on the ferry and headed off for Edith Falls/ Leliyn where the trail ends and there is road access.

The trail was, like the Larapinta, unformed, and often only navigable because of the blue triangular trail markers, but it was not as strenuous as the Larapinta Trail in the West MacDonnells. The major challenge was the heat. By 10 a.m. it was already too hot to keep walking with a full backpack, but the trail was often so slow going that we didn't reach each day's campsite until after noon. Fortunately, every campsite was located close to delightful creeks, waterfalls, pools and cascades, so we spent the rest of the afternoon escaping the heat and the flies by swimming and sitting in the water! The last 2 days took us along the Edith River after descending from the Arnhem Land tableland - plenty of wildlife and..mosquitos, but there were lovely waterholes to cool off in all along the river, with some of the best left to the last just short of Leliyn.



Jatbula Trail, pics from left to right by row:
Jawoyn Country, Alison at Sandy Camp,
Crystal Creek, 17 Mile waterfall,
Both of us cooling off in the first waterhole on the Edith River,
Alison in the Edith river downstream, dingo, one of a pack of 8 near Sweetwater Pool.

Back off the trail at Leliyn we drove the 300 km up to Darwin where we had spent nearly 3 years teaching back in the late 90s. Darwin has of course grown considerably, even since 2008 when we were last in the city on Saraoni, but we were amused to note that the Dinah Beach Yacht Club where we were based most of the time had not changed at all - it was still the same ramshackle boatyard and boats too decadent to ever survive in the water.

For the final fling through the Top End we swung through Kakadu National Park, Australia's largest at 20,000 km2. We never had time to visit Kakadu in the dry season while living in Darwin and the wet season visits were always problematic.

The heart of Kakadu is the South Alligator River and its associated billabongs and wetlands. Kakadu protects the whole of the South Alligator's catchment from the Arnhem Land escarpment right through to the Van Diemen Gulf. Birds flock here in their hundreds of thousands when the dry season advances as there are always permanent wetlands for them to feed in.

We paid out for the famous Yellow Water tour by boat and were glad we did. The guide, a part Aboriginal guy from country NSW, loved these waters and the birds and provided great insight into Kakadu and the relationship between the land, its wild animals and plants and the indigenous people who used this area sustainably for over 40,000 years. And of course, there were plenty of crocodiles everywhere. We saw them in the Adelaide River, at Fogg Dam, in the South and East Alligator Rivers and many more in the Yellow Water billabongs.



From left to right, row byrow:
Croc and egret observers at Fogg Dam near Humpty Doo, croc out on the bank at the South Alligator river, all other croc photos taken at Yellow Water;
Magpie geese at Fogg dam, jacana baby, jabiru (black necked stork;
White bellied sea eagle, Nourlangie Rock across Angbangban billabong, whistling ducks at Yellow Water.

Photo shows us on Day 10 at Brinkley Bluff, the first major high point along the Larapinta Trail.

We are back in Alice Springs after hiking most, but not all, of the Larapinta Trail. The trail snakes its way along the tops of the arid ridges west of Alice, at times threading its way through narrow gorges or 'gaps', at others winding a route across the bumpy lower levels between the Chewings and Heavitree ranges.

The name of the trail comes from the Arrernte name for the Finke River, Larapinta (salty water). Like all the other rivers here in Central Australia, there is water almost always flowing below the sandy river beds while the beds themselves are dry. Occasionally, like this last La Niña summer, it actually does rain quite hard, usually because a monsoonal low has slipped further south into the desert than usual. Then the rivers really do flood, helping to shape the way the gorges rip through the ranges. The Finke is the major river in these parts, funneling summer rainfall into the Simpson Desert. In exceptional years (like this one), water gets as far as Lake Eyre in South Australia's desert north, where its journey ends. The waterholes do become more salty as water evaporates in the dry season, but tasted OK to us as we crossed over and camped on the Finke's tributaries!

Despite the name of the trail, it has no particular significance in the way it has been constructed, which is rather arbitrary. Arrernte people lived here for thousands of years before being turfed into mission stations by early colonists. It's hard to believe that they survived so well in this harsh land, making use of the numerous waterholes that dot the area, mostly in the gorges where there are permanent, deep pools.

Of the 223 km of the trail we managed about 170 over a three week period, including the two highest points of Brinkley Bluff and Mount Sonder. The trail was one of the hardest we have done, mainly because of the rocky nature of the landscape and the fact that the trail itself was 'unformed', basically consisting of a route marked by blue triangles without an actual path having been constructed. Each ridge and gorge seemed like an obstacle course and our progress was often down to a kilometer an hour, although where the trail was flatter we could pick up speed. The weather alternated between cold mornings and warm days to cool mornings and very hot days. On the hotter days, the flies were so bothersome that we donned fly nets and kept flapping. On a few occasions we diverted from the main trail to stumble down dry river beds where we camped in the sand near a waterhole or two, shared by invisible mammals and numbers of birds.

One disappointment was the lack of wildlife. It was only to be expected that life was hard out here, but despite the obvious signs in the sand of dingoes, euros (sort of half way between a wallaby and a kangaroo), rock wallabies, camels and feral cattle, we saw no mammal life except for mice, which were everywhere, although dingoes howled one early morning. The most common birds were little finches, ringneck parrots, honeyeaters, budgerigars and crows. Many of Australia's smaller marsupial populations have taken a huge hit from introduced predators, particulalrly feral cats and foxes. NT's Parks & Wildlife Commission laments that formerly bountiful parts of Larapinta country like Ghost Gum Flat once had possums, bilbies and bettongs. No more.

We are now heading south to take a look at two of Australia's most famous landmarks - Uluru and the Kata Tjutas, then back up north again to Katherine, closer to Darwin where we are going to heave the backpacks up again on the 6 day Jatbula Trail in Nitmiluk National Park. Katherine is a lot hotter than Alice Springs, so we will have to take advantage of the numerous streams and rivers across the path of the trail - a welcome change from Larapinta.

The Australian federal election is taking place as this blog is being posted, with all hopes for a change in government. The ALP, like many social democratic parties everywhere, is timid and disappointing, but still a better bet than the current mob who have done enough damage in Oz over the last 9 years.

Update - the ALP has won the federal election with the help of the rise in the Green vote and second preferences directed towards Labor. It's probably no wonder after back to back climate disasters and loss in faith with the Coalition that the election has taken a more progressive direction. Hopefully, Labor will only have a minority government and will be forced to act on its policy pledges by the federal crossbench and the balance of power that the Greens are likely to have in the Senate.



Day 1- Geoff crossing the Darwin to Adelaide railtrack just before the Ghan rolled past.



Euro Ridge appearing on Day 1. Yes, that's the trail clinging to the very top of the ridge!



The cold waterhole at Bond Gap on Day 3



Overlooking Fish Hole in Jeay Creek - Day 6



Camped in the river bed in Jeay Creek - Day 6




The chasm at Standley Chasm - Day 7



The view of the trail landscape leading up towards Brinkley Bluff. We camped on that narrow ridge top as wind and rain forced a swift and uncomfortable stop - Day 9.



Alison descending Brinkley Bluff - Day 10.



Camped in the river at Stuart's Gap - Day 10.



The secure (from mice) cupboard at the 4/5 Junction campsite shelter - Day 11.



Birthday Waterhole near 4/5 Junction - Day 11.



Ghost gum at Ghost Gum Flat between Hugh Gorge and Ellery Creek - Day 13.



Loo at Rocky Gully campsite - Day 13.



Lookout from the saddle on the Heavitree Range near Ellery Creek - Day 14. it took us two days to hike the low land from the distant Chewings Range.



Ellery Creek South "Big Hole" - a popular swimming spot for Alice Springs residents and one place where an access road allows us to reprovision - Day 15.



Ormiston Gorge - Day 17.



Mount Sonder at the end of Larapinta Trail highest point of the trail at 1320m - Day 20.