Day 20 – Wilpena Pound

Wilpena Pound is a sacred place for the Aboriginals of the area and it’s not hard to see why. It is an area of outstanding beauty and interesting formation and structure. It is essentially a small ring of mountains with a valley in the centre. The Aboriginals believe it was formed by two snakes traveling to a ceremony who, when they got there, ate all the tribesmen (apart from a few who escaped) and stayed there and formed a circle of mountains because they got so bloated from their huge meal that they willed themselves to die. Indeed, one of the escarpments on the outside of the pound really does look like the head of a snake.

We took a walk all the way up the outside to a lookout today, which really revealed the beauty of this outback landscape. On our way we were lucky enough to see lots of Euros (a small kind of kangaroo adapted to rocks) bounding about, with many of them fairly unperturbed by our presence.

One of the Euros having a feed just a couple of feet from us.

Part of the inside of the circle of Wilpena Pound.

~ by thesynapse on 7 March, 2009.