Seems I spoke a little too soon regarding the quietness if the campsite. About 2am Deb and I got up for a leak, and it seemed to trigger a huge yowling session by the nearby dingoes. One of them must have been right beside our tent, but we never saw it. A bit later it got windy, so there were various rustling, flapping and creaking noises. Then the kids camped next door woke up at first light and started yabbering away. Victorians. Most of the pushy tailgating drivers are too.

We drove to the northern end of the park today, which was even more stunning than the southern end, if that is possible.

From the lookout on top of a modest knoll we soaked in a perfect 360 degree panorama with the towering red sandstone cliffs of the Bungle Bungle range to the east, a range of shapely hills to the west, rocky outcrops north and south, and all the intervening land is covered with green spinifex clumps and dotted with light green and white ghost gums and the blue-grey of another type of tree, with a few termite mounds here and there, then above there were dramatic patterns of high cloud against the blue sky. And not a mark of human influence to be seen anywhere, save for the track in and the seat on which we sat, with the warm sun on our backs and a cool breeze on our faces. No wonder the place is on the world heritage list. If you haven’t seen it, start planning to do so.

Echidna Chasm is the other feature we visited. As we approached the red cliffs we kept saying “wow! wow! wow!” as the scale of them begins to sink in, and you see new angles and facets. “Cliffs” is not really the right word; when I think of cliffs I think of the Grose Gorge in the Blue Mountains in NSW. These are more like Uluru or Kata Tjuta in central Australia, huge rocks rising from the surrounding plain. Echidna Chasm is several hundred metres long, 180 metres deep and its width varies from twenty metres or so to just half a metre in spots, but it’s not straight, the canyon bends along its length and the walls curve and twist as they ascend. Interesting, but I prefer the panoramic views outside.

On the way back to our camp we saw a couple of dingoes beside, well, on the road. Don’t know what they were doing awake after howling all of last night. And now they are at it again tonight, where do they get the energy?

One last highlight to mention, our first game of Animal Concentration for the holiday. We only had five players, but it had the boys cackling for about half an hour. Every time Poppy did the elephant he would make a snorting noise, which the boys then had to copy. And everyone got a turn in the elephant’s chair, which made for a nice fair game. Elephant, giraffe, crocodile, dog and kangaroo.