Painted Desert South Australia | Arckaringa Hills | Gekko Safari

People expect the salt at Lake Eyre to be the dramatic bit of the trip. Then they see the Painted Desert at golden hour and quietly rethink things. It’s a run of low, flat-topped hills and breakaways between Coober Pedy and William Creek, on Arckaringa Station country, and the colours are properly strange: rusty reds, creamy whites, soft purples and yellows layered into the rock.

Those bands are old sediment, laid down when this area was under an inland sea, then cooked and weathered by time. The iron in the rock gives you the reds and oranges, and the paler layers are clay and sandstone. The light does the rest. Go at midday and it looks a bit washed out. Go in the last hour before sunset and the whole hillside seems to glow.

Tips from the road

• Late afternoon is the time to be there, both for colour and for the heat
• Take plenty of water, there’s no shade and no shop
• The hills sit on a pastoral station, so follow signs and don’t wander off marked tracks
• A wide lens helps, but your eyes will do a better job than any camera

If you’re only going to add one detour to a Lake Eyre trip, this is the one I’d pick. It costs you a little time and gives you a landscape that looks nothing like the salt flats, which makes the whole journey feel bigger.