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Published: March 12th 2007
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Camel Racing
England V Germany! Having travelled on the 'mighty' Indian Pacific for 44 hours from Perth to Adelaide, our 19 hour journey on the 'legendary' Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs went surprisingly quickly. 'The Ghan' is pretty much identical to 'The Indian Pacific', except it travels between Adelaide and Darwin, stopping only at Alice Springs in the middle. So when we arrived at midday on the 24th Feb, the serious increase in temperature hit us immediately when we stepped out of the train. Scorchio!
Thankfully our hostel, 'The Alice Lodge', was complete with a pool, which was pretty much where we spent the rest of the day.
At 6am the next morning, we were picked up for the beginning of our 3 day/2 night, longawaited 'Rock Tour'. At that time of the morning we were all pretty sleppy still, and as other members of the group joined the bus, we all still remained fairly quiet. That was until two 18 year old lads from Shropshire joined the bus, who shall be referred to in ths this blog entry as the most excellent characters 'Bill and Ted'! Bill and Ted had literally been up all night drinking, and were still clearly pretty hammered
Mount Connor
AKA Fool-uru as they made their very loud entrance onto the bus. It wasn't long though until they were both sound asleep, catching flies!
It's a pretty long drive from Alice Springs to Uluru (Ayer's Rock) - approx 5 hours - but we made a few stops along the way, where we started to encounter those friendly flies (little buggers!). We also took part in 'Camel Olympics'! We were of course representing England and found ourselves up against Germany, but were robbed of the gold medal. However, it was later revealed that Germany's camel was officially a race camel, whereas ours was a phoney! Laura was disappointed with the result, but Luke was more concerned about the numbness he was experiencing in places we won't mention!
We eventually arrived at 'The Ayers Rock Resort' (our non-politically-correct named campsite) in
Yulara, where the temperature was 47 degrees (pretty toasty!!) before heading into the park to see the rock (Uluru) itself. As a result of the heat, the rock climb to the top was closed. However, we didn't mind as the climb is a huge money-maker for the Oz government, despite it being hugely disrespectful to the Aborgiginal Community who ask that
Dingo
Tame (crossed with a sheep dog or something strange!) people do not climb Uluru. So instead we did the short 'Mala Walk' around part of the base of the rock. Although it was a short walk, it was made a tad difficult as we were constantly battling against literally millions of flies, despite sporting some very attractive fly nets! Even then the little buggers would manage too find their way into every oriface! We both lost count of the number of times that we forgot that we were wearing our fly nets and tried to put some food/drink into our mouths! Suave!
After a much needed chillout in the campsite pool, we headed back to Uluru (armed with beer) ready for sunset. The rock glowed for a couple of minutes whilst the sun was setting, but we soon realised that the bright colour of the postcard images of the red rock at sunset have usually been cheekily photo-shopped on the computer!
Our tour guides knocked up a fab stirfry, and after a couple more beers, we unrolled our swags ready for our first night out under the stars. The thousands of stars in the desert sky was absolutely spectacular! Despite it still being pretty hot overnight and
the sound of Dingoes around us howling, we slept pretty well. Well until 4:30am anyway, when we had to get up in time for sunrise back at the rock.
After a cup of tea, some toast and a few flies, we headed to The Olga's (proper name Kata Tjuta), which are actually bigger than Uluru, although are a group of rocks rather than a monolith. Kata Tjuta is also very sacred to the local Anangu people, to the extent that the 'white fellas' haven't earned the respect to be told the full significance yet, but at least here the government has prevented people from climbing. A good 2 hour walk around these was rewarded with a chunk of fruit cake (and a few more flies), closely followed by some tasty wraps. The flies patrcularly enjoyed the tuna, which really freaked out a few of the girly-girls in our group!
We then hit the road again for another fairly long drive to the Kings Creek Station, where we were to camp that night. En route we stopped to collect some fire wood, which kind of seemed a little unnecessary based on the temperature the previous night, and to find
Uluru Sunset
Too late- colour back to brown again! some bush tucker. Our slightly crazy tour guide almost had a breakdown trying to dig up a witchedy grub, as he had forgotten his spade! But eventually he found a fat one, which he fried on a dead shrub, chopped into four pieces and offered it around. Unfortunately we were still full from our fruit cake, but Bill and Ted and a couple of others jumped at the chance and described it as 'nutty'!
By the time we reached the Station, no one was interested in going for a ride in a helicopter, or on a Harley Davidson or more camel olympics, all of which were on offer if we wanted. Instead we took the Esky full of beer and Goon to the pool! Very relaxing, although the pool maybe needed the chlorine topping up as it had quite a healthy eco-system inside it, including some very nippy (in more than one sense of the word) water beetles!
On day three we were up at 4am so that we could get on with our trek around Kings Canyon before the heat got too deadly. The trek was nicely broken up with a splash in the rock pool, the
Garden of Eden, at the bottom of the canyon. Reeefreshing!
The long long drive back to Alice Springs was made a lot more bearable with some excellent DJ-ing by our trainee tour guide JP (bring on the Baywatch theme tune!). We also had a brief stop at an Aboriginal Art Gallery/Shop where Luke bought a hand carved 'digging stick'! Let's hope he's not planning to find his own witchedy grubs! Urghh!
We ended an excellent 3 days with a meal in Alice Springs followed by more cold beverages at cheesey Wild-West style 'Bojangles' along with several other tour groups. Two more days in Alice Springs was a great way to relax and recover from a fantastic but exhausting experience, before we got back on the Ghan to enjoy another night of sleeping upright on our return to Adelaide.
Oh, and finally, go to
The Rock Tour and have a look at the Photo Gallery and find the tour from 25th Feb with Leith and JP to see a couple more photos from our trip. Just watch out for the bums in one of the pictures (not ours)!
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LadyJanus
Jane Hammond
Looks like fun!