Explore.Dream.Discover 2012

Oz Pt4 - The Red Centre

AUSTRALIA | Tuesday, 3 July 2012 | Views [525]

We arrived in darwin at about 6am and headed to the youth hostel that our tour had booked us into. This was our first ever 'hostel experience' having done well to avoid themfor four months. We were pretty dissapointed to learn that there was not a double room available and that i would have to stay in the female dorm, and oresti in the male dorm. My room was hot and stank of rotting vommit, while oresti was awoken to his bunk bed rocking as his fellow room mate brought a dirty friend home for the night. DISGUSTING!!We were collected by our tour guide, who constantly talked about himself and that he was 'actually a chef', to begin our Northern Territory journey from Darwin to Alice Springs. There were only 7 of us doing the tour and so there was ample space on the bus to stretch out and enjoy the views. Our first stop was Katherine Gorge. A beautiful river flowing through valleys and mountains. We had a few hours to kill there and oresti looked forward to trying out his new fishing rod. He looked the part but still no fish were caught. We then headed to our camping spot for the night where dinner was prepared and cooked by the 'chef'. Not bad but oresti could have done better. We made a campfire and all sat around it chatting and cooking marshmellows. I also seized the opportunity to dry my just washed undies on a stick. Bed time came and we went to sleep in our little shed. Lucky we had sleeping bags as it was pretty nippy.The following day we visited a natural hot spring. Finally, a nice hot bath!! Bliss!! We then had lunch at one of the oldest pubs opened in 1932 and continued our journey to the next campsite. There was a lot of driving involved on this day and we were happy when we arrived at camp to rest for the night. The next day we stopped at the old telegraph station which when built connected England to the south of Australia using a single copper cable and morse code reduced the communication time from 7 months to just 8 hours. We then visited then the devils marbles. We took some great photos but we couldnt quite climb as high as Luke (my brother) did in his famous photo taken a while back now.Our guide stopped the bus so that we could pop into a mango seller to buy mango icecream. We also then managed to have a free wine tasting session where we tried mango liquer (too strong), mango port (too sweet), red wine (too strange) and a sparkling mango mist (too good). We all chipped in and bought a bottle of mist for later. We arrived into Alice Springs, glad to say goodbye to our wholly tour guide chef my arse and celebrated by drinking the bottle of Mango Mist with our new friends. We had a free day to spend in Alice and heard about a school called The School of Air. It is basically an online school where teachers teach live over the internet and pupils learn from home. Many children live hundreds of miles away from a school and so this school is perfect for them. They would have a tutor with them (either a parent or paid support) and work would be posted (free post) backwards and forwards between the teacher and pupil. We decided that we would like to go and see how this works so we began our walk which we were told would be about 3km. No probs. To make sure that we were heading in the correct direction we asked a lady who was about to get into her car. "I'm going that way so I'll take you.." she kindly offered. She then realised it was school holidays and told us that it would be closed but she'd take us anyway. We decided that there was no point, thanked her and continued onto a cool gallery and old aircraft museum. We asked a nice old man about the school and he said he'd find the number so we could call to check. They were actually open but were not filming. We decided to go anyway. We asked the old man for directions. "Wait for 20 minutes and then I'll take you on my way home" he said. Wow these Aussies are really nice people!! He was true to his word and took us to the school. What a nice man. The school was pretty cool and we were able to see a video clip of how the teacher and children interact online. Crazy!!We had another early start the next day for our final tour of Alice Springs to Ayres Rock. This time we had a lovely tour guide called Caddi who was friendly and approachable. The first stop was at Kings Canyon. We did a 3 hour walk in the area and the views were stunning. I wasn't tooimpressed by the 300 steep steps we had to climb to get to the top but it was worth it. We were really hungry by the time we got back to the bus and still had to cook dinner. More marshmellows on the fire and it was time to get into our sleeping bags and swags for the night. -2 degrees and sleeping right under the stars. We woke up to a thin sheet of ice ontop of us. We slept really well. After breakfast we went to the famous Uluru (Ayres Rock) and Kata Kjuta. Uluru was a gobsmackingly amazing sight to see with the vibrant red rock against the bright blue sky. It was amazing. We had the choice of either climbing the rock (against the aboriginals wishes) or having a cultural walk around it. We obviously opted to walk around it as the views from the bottom were great and we learnt about the culture and history along the way. It definitely felt like a very spiritual place with loads of positive energy in the area. Ayres Rock is a sacred site for the aboriginal culture and they ask that people do not climb it, however, lots of people ignore them and do it anyway. Big egos or what!?We saw the sun setting over the rock and took some cool photos. The colours were awesome and it was amazing at how quickly the rock changed from one colour to another with dusk and dawn. That evening we had a delicious BBQ feast of beef steak, camel sausages and kangaroo meat. Yum yum in my tum. Another good nights sleep under the stars before being woken up at 5:15 to catch sunrise at the point between Ayres Rock snd Kata Kjuta. As soon as the rising bright orange sun made its appearance, everyone took a deep breath in. It was spectacular. Ayres rock again, began to change colours before our very eyes. Our third walk of the trip was about to begin. This one was at Kata Jtuta, another sacred sight for the aborigibal people. It took about 3-4 hours and oresti and I were hungry before we even began. The walk was great, we saw bouncing kangaroos and again the views were amazing. We also saw a dingo, to the guides amazement, as they are only 15 years away from becoming extinct.Our tour ended and we spent the night in Uluru before our morning flight back to Sydney.

Tags: outback