Wednesday, Jan 06, 2010 at 18:02
It certainly would make it a very long day. Even the road between Drysdale and the
Mitchell Plateau needs to be taken slowly, according to conditions. I would not recommend driving on roads in that area after dark. From Drysdale to the KE
River crossing is not a long distance, but with the conditions (and it was still early in the season as we were there in June before the worst of the crowds carve up the roads) it was all we did in a day each way.
We also stayed the the
King Edward River campground, which was lovely and in fact my favourite
camp site of the whole trip. So nice, that after spending three or four days there, we called in for an overnight on the return from
Kalumburu. We also looked at the Aboriginal
Rock painting sites, one of which is very near the
river crossing, and the other a few kilometres west of the
campground.
Mitchell Falls was an all day trip; we packed up the camping gear planning to overnight at the falls
parking area camp ground, leaving the caravan at the KE River
campground. Most people were leaving their campers at the
campground to visit the falls as the road has a reputation of being badly corrugated, and is narrow for the last few kilometres which creates problems when vehicles need to pass in either direction even without trailers. At least one of the dips is rather sharp and can damage larger caravans.
We left
camp around 8 am which in hind sight was an hour too late. I got rather overheated on the walk from the car park/helipad to the falls, although cooling off underneath Little Merten Falls near the start helped. We hoped to take the slightly longer 'mudcrab' helicopter flight on for the return, but as it cost the same for two as for four, we hoped to get someone to share but this didn't eventuate so we just had the six minute 'taxi' back to the helipad. The 'taxi' flight is charged at the same rate per person regardless of how many passengers. They do a few loops over the falls as the chopper rises. We had booked the latest return chopper (allowing for 'mudcrab') which was around 4.30 pm. This gave us time to swim above the main falls and cool down on arrival, have our picnic lunch with friends from the
campground, walk around to vantage points to photograph the falls, and swim and cool down again before meeting our chopper taxi. I welcomed the flight back rather than walk back again. We decided we still had enough daylight to return to our caravan at dusk without needing to overnight there. It was still a full on and tiring day.
Motherhen
AnswerID:
397946