Phototravelog, The Flinders Ranges

A couple of months ago I had a chance to travel to the Flinders Ranges, one of nature wonder of Australia, about 400 kms north of Adelaide. If you'd like to catc a glimpse of Australian outback, here is the place. We managed to get to Flinders Ranges and back to Adelaide, IN JUST ONE DAY! That's about 800 kms journey in a day. It took us about 6 hour to go there and 6 hour to go back with our rented car, since speed limits applied in South Australia (damn! :) ). Anyway, here I post some of the pictures.

A typical road on our way to Wilpena Pound, the visitor centre of the Flinders Ranges. I think this was between Hawker and Wilpena, not sure!


That's the Flinders Ranges outback, near Port Augusta.
The Southern Flinders Ranges, a breathtaking scenery...

The Castle Rock, a weird structure resembles ruins of a castle. But it is actually shaped by nature.


Meet this little cutie. A weird creature. I think this kind of dessert lizzard can only be found in Australia.Actually, within the caves of this hill you may see many indegenous Australian paintings, which dated back from thousands of years ago. But we did not have a chance to go inside.

The Gate of Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges National Park... finally we're here.

Inside the range of Northern Flinders Ranges mountains... it's beautiful but hard to catch it by my camera, you have to be there yourself to feel it.

Another side of the Northern Flinders Ranges mountains.

It was a fun trip. I really enjoyed it. But this enjoyment was almost ruined when our car almost run out of fuel On the way back to Adelaide, and no fuel station openned in all towns we passed. Well, what do you expect? It was around 9 pm, of course most of fuel stations in the small towns of Australia won't open after 5 pm.

Let me tell you about small towns of Australia. Population is usually between 50 (Fifty!) to 1000. Any population figures bigger than 1000 is usually considered as big enough towns. COmpare that to the population of a small village in Java which usually comprise of thousands in population. Ironic isn't it?

Well, Australia is big continent country with only 20 something millions population, and almost half of them live in just four cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. No wonder many inland towns have only such a small population.

Anyway, we were fortunate that we still had enough fuel to detour our journey to the nearest big town called Port Pirie, halfway between Port Augusta and Adelaide, and lucky there is one fuel station that was still open at that hour. I couldn't imagine what will happened to us if we cannot find a single station and stranded in the middle of nowhere in the Australian outback.