Day 24 – 12th June

Today’s adventure took us to Kalamina Gorge, which we have dubbed “Dragonfly Gorge”.   Compared to the others it is a gentle giant. It is much wider and  it seemed to go on forever…  Some steep stairs get you to the bottom just up from one end where the water cascades down a small waterfall.  We checked out the waterfall then turned back to hike along the base.  It was pretty scenery, lots of pools separated by streams and rapids and there were dragonflies everywhere… fire engine red ones, yellow ones, big blue ones… 

We hiked for ages before turning around and heading back to the waterfall.  On the way there was much talk about who was brave enough to stand under the freezing water.  All three managed to do it but there was a lot of squealing from Megan… 

After Kalamina we headed back to camp for a quiet afternoon… which meant mum got to sit and relax for a bit while the other three walked back to Joffre Gorge (the closest gorge to our camp). 

Our day was not finished there… the awesomeness was yet to come… There is a guy here who does a nightly astronomy tour.  He sets up his four massive telescopes on a hill out the back of the camp.  

He started by showing us certain features of the sky, constellations included.  Lucky for me, Scorpio was looming large and easy to see.  Some of the others were a little obscure and required an active imagination or some sort of hallucinogenic drug to decipher…  Next came the deep space viewing.  We started with our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, which is actually a binary system.  To the naked eye it looks like a single star, however, through the telescope you could see the two suns side by side. 

We are fortunate there are two planets in the sky at the moment.  The first planet we viewed was Jupiter.  We could see four of it’s sixty four moons, three were in a line above the planet and one below.  There were also a couple of storm bands running vertically down the planet’s surface.  Next we looked at the ‘Jewel Box’.  This constellation has a red, a yellow and a blue star lined up vertically, surrounded by a square of dark space then edged with some stars… very cool.  We were then treated to a ‘Globular Cluster’, a cluster of 10 million suns… phenomenal…it was so dense.  The finale of the night was a spectacular view of Saturn.  Again we could see a few of it’s moons.  The rings were really clear, so much so we could also make out the gap in the ring where the material was consumed when a moon tried to form.  The kids loved every minute of it and Dave and I were blown away with this guy’s knowledge and the spectacular viewing.  It was a brilliant and memorable evening!

To complete the night, in the wee hours of the morning we could hear dingoes howling.  They sounded pretty close, at least within the vicinity of the camp.  Dave had been talking to some German tourists who had seen them one night outside their tent.  I think they thought Dave was crazy when he said that was pretty cool… they definitely didn’t think it was cool…