Isolating in Wilpena Pound

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Wilpena Pound, South Australia, Australia

The latest rules and regulations required that all Victorians submit to a COVID-19 test upon entering South Australia. This proved easier said than done. There was no-one at the border offering COVID-19 tests and upon calling the health centre in the first town that offered testing, we were advised that the Orroroo health centre was only open until 1.30p.m. The SA Health website did not have opening hour information so naturally, we assumed that clinics were open during normal business hours.

Hawker was the next town and their health centre closed at 3.30pm. This presented a slight dilemma in that we wouldn't arrive until after closing time at either location.

A few phone calls later, SA Health advised that someone would wait at Hawker for us; however, our test swabs wouldn't be sent away until the next day. Not a very efficient service, or helpful for SA tourism, as we passed through towns where we would normally have stopped.

No-one could tell us how long we would have to wait for our test results.

As we had to self-isolate pending our test results, camping was out of the question as we would have had to share the amenities.

Wilpena Pound

We thus had to book a hotel room. With the skies darkening and heavy wind and rain forecast, we weren't too sad to book into the only available hotel room. Mum and Dad are choosing to not remember the exorbitant price that we had to pay for our very simple room.

As soon as we were notified about our negative test results, we hit the trails in Wilpena Pound. Unfortunately, due to the wet conditions, we were unable to do the longer and more difficult hikes to St Mary's Peak and Mt Ohlssen Bagge.

The skies remained dark, but the rain held off and we enjoyed the spectacular scenery as we hiked to the Homestead and the Wangarra lookouts instead. We started the hike to the Bridal Gap but aborted about 1km from the end due to muddy conditions.

The great thing about visiting the Flinders Ranges in winter is that there aren't too many visitors and we were able to explore freely without seeing many people.

Us kids just wanted to climb and hike the harder and higher trails. We prayed that the weather would clear in time for us to do so!