Thursday, May 12, 2016

I decided to rest for two days in Hawker. Despite being a tiny town with a population of around 300 people, Hawker contains a police station and hospital… not to jinx future hikers by mentioning that. The biggest tourist attraction is a panoramic painting of the view from St. Mary’s Peak in Wilpena Pound. I’m staying at the caravan park at the eastern edge of town, which is a few minutes’ walk from the western edge of town. It has a laundry, camp kitchen, pool and very friendly owners. Caravans are numerous – caravanning in Australia is popular and there’s a term, ‘grey nomads’, for retirees who spend the entire year caravanning – but I’m the only tenter.

I spent today completing camp chores: laundry, picking up my resupply package at the post office, and looking for canister fuel. The Friends’ website claims that canisters are plentiful at the general store, but the general store had none, and the place across the street (a combo visitor centre/store/service station?) only had monstrous 400+ ml canisters. I still have a small amount of gas left in my first canister, so I decided to pack in a sandwich for one supper and rely on my remaining gas for the other two suppers. Bought a container of ice cream ❤

The outlets in the laundry room/kitchen are slow at charging my phone.