Anna Creek Painted Desert Scenic Flight Review
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my most popular articles or learn more about Neerav Bhatt. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I recently took a scenic flight over the Anna Creek Painted Desert (aka Painted Hills) during my Trans-Australia Road Trip through the arid desert which dominates central Australia
These spectacular painted hills are located within the confines of the Woomera rocket range within an hours flight from William Creek (population 10) a former stop on the since-relocated Ghan railway line which is the smallest town in South Australia, situated between Marree and Oodnadatta on the historic Oodnadatta Track.
Photos & Videos Slideshow
You can view a selection of photos and videos I took during the flight:
Anna Creek Painted Hills Scenic Flight Review
Geologists call the region breakaway country - arid plateaus in the South Australian desert where 50 million years of climate change have laid bare the desert’s oxidised rock strata revealing pedestal rocks and sandstone hills of vividly coloured ochre yellow oxide, red and deep brown with contrasting crisp whites and jet blacks.
The whole area is encompassed by Anna Creek station, the largest cattle station in the world leased from the Crown by S. Kidman & Co. and at 24,000 square kilometres in size, bigger than Belgium, a statement that really annoyed a Belgian girl in my backpacking tour group 
The operators of the one hour “Anna Creek Secret painted Hills” flight, Wrights Air, have special permission from them to run scenic flights as Anna Creek station doesn’t allow land access to the lunar like landscape covering 20 x 18 kilometres because of fears it would cause irreparable damage
The station management hope that allowing aerial access will raise awareness of their fragility and protect them from intruders on the ground because “It’s a very soft alluvial ground and if there’s a tyre track in there it will stay there for years.”
Cost
The quoted price for normal tourists is $180/person with a minimum of 4 passengers for flights to take place.
Backpackers through Groovy Grape tours get to do it for $120 but we managed to haggle down to $100/person (which is a real bargain) because I passed through William Creek during mid-Winter when Wrights Air must been suffering from very low customer numbers.
If you have a quality SLR or Ultrazoom camera I would suggest taking your own photos (see my slideshow above).
If you have a basic point and shoot camera or weren’t able to take photos yourself than at the end of the flight you can buy a Photo CD for $10. I thought most of the photos on the CD were average, the resolution wasn’t very high and to top it off my CD wasn’t burnt properly so I couldn’t view all of them anyway.
They also sell postcards and these are good quality, well worth it for a few dollars each or cheaper if you buy a pack of them all together.
If you enjoyed this article, Subscribe to my RSS feed
10 Comments about “Anna Creek Painted Desert Scenic Flight Review”
Add Your Comment
Related Articles
- Aerial view of the Oodnadatta Track - Free Desktop Wallpaper
- Adelaide to Darwin Backpacking Road Trip Overview
- Photos from Outback South Australia, The Red Centre and Tropical Top End
- Fly Carbon Neutral With Virgin Blue Carbon Credits
That’s just an incredible landscape. Great photos, especially considering you took them from a plane.
Those are some fantastic photos,thanks for sharing
It was cool! When I saw those pictures, it feels like those picturesque had taken me away to another side of heaven
What a great bunch of photographs. I so much want to visit Australia and experience it for myself. Thanks for sharing them with us.
Wow! That’s a beautiful flight. You’ve got good talents in the slideshow.
Thanks for the advice on the haggle. In many toursist places, you can always haggle with the quoted price.
excellent pictures, and i love the slideshow feature!
Yea man nice pics. I plan to do a trip sometime round Australia. I’m going for a 3 week tour around New Zealand at the end of the year. I’ll be find some secluded spots go camping hopefully find some nice waves. My next expedition is Australia but that will take me a bit longer. The Anna Creek Painted Desert is so vast, I had no idea.
They are absolutely amazing pictures. Sometimes I wish I had traveled about a bit before settling down in my home town. Makes me a bit sad sometimes that Ive kind of missed my chance to do something amazing…
[…] a holiday crossing Australia South to North from Adelaide to Darwin by road, along the way I did a Scenic Flight over the Anna Creek Painted Desert where I got this great photo of an Aerial view of the Oodnadatta […]
[…] a holiday crossing Australia South to North from Adelaide to Darwin by road, along the way I did a Scenic Flight over the Anna Creek Painted Desert where I got this great photo of an Aerial view of the Oodnadatta […]