Day 40-42 - Fitzroy Crossing and Bungle Bungles

We stayed overnight at Fitzroy Crossing on the way to the Bungle Bungles. Great big grassy sites and the Bombers had a fantastic (but meaningless) win over the Blues. Still, always good to beat the old enemy.

Bungle Bungles caravan park was pretty basic, all temporary buildings, but we were looking forward to the tour of the Bungle Bungles the next day.

At the start of the tour we were told that the road was in good condition and it would only take us 1 and a half hours to travel the 50km to the Bungle Bungles (instead of the normal 2 hours). The road was still terrible with corrugations most of the way.

The pictures above are of Cathedral Gorge and Echidna Chasm. These two gorges were cut deep into the sandstone by the streams of water in the wet season. The walls of the gorges rise up about 200-300 metres and Echidna Chasm is so narrow in some places that we needed to walk single file.

We also learnt that the Bungle Bungles are about 350 million years old and were originally formed when sediment from nearby older mountains was deposited in a deep trench in an inland sea. This is why the rock at the northern end of the Bungle Bungles is different from the rock at the southern end. The larger heavier pebbles were deposited first in the north and the finer sediments last in the south.

The beehive domes are only found in the south. The stripes are formed because the more porous rock layers retain moisture which allow Cyanobacteria (of stromatolite fame) to form a grey layer on the surface. The other rock layers are red as a result of the rusting of iron in the rock.