After a brief encounter with Alice Springs, Steve, Renée, Gill and I hired a car and headed south. To cut a long story short, the camper van continued to head south to Adelaide and officially left the trip but we wanted to continue so needed to get back to Alice Springs! Right, so after a glancing blow with a shopping trolley and driving 450 kms south, we arrived just in time to see the sun setting over the largest monolith in the world, Uluru!
As the sun hit the side of the rock, it glowed a magnificent orange and gold as the sky changed colours. It looked stunning, definitely worth the wait!
That night we camped within minutes of this natural wonder, pretty cool! The next day though, we raced to get to the vantage spot to see the sun rise over the Olga's. The Olga's are similar to Uluru but they consist of many rocks, gorges and valleys.
We did a couple of amazing hikes through these and were massively surprised how green everything was. We were told that this was a red Barron desert but was actually green and luscious with a couple of red rocks!
In all the other countries we have visited, we have tried to embrace the local culture so to keep our culture levels up we were to the Aborigine centre and boomerang throwing! We even made it return! Not entirely accurately but it came back!! All very exciting!
Our next stop was a place called King's Canyon about 300 kms away. The sunset was surprisingly a bit of a disappointment. The highlight was a 7 or 8 year old girl who exclaimed how bored she was at watching a rock and also managed to lock herself, with the keys, inside the car and set off the alarm while her despairing father looked on helpless!
So after a delicious meal, we went for a swim under the stars! Our new campsite had a pool which we made great use of! It just felt nice to have a bit of a soak to get rid of some ingrained red dust!
The next morning was pretty good though! After a bit of unplanned off roading, we got back to the Kings Canyon for sunrise and did a walk around the canyons rim. It was spectacular and the photos do not do any justice for it.
We did however, manage to see a huge amount in a few days but had to go back to Alice to meet back up with the rest of the group! This was only a "little detour" but was nearly 1500 kms. Australia is a really massive country!
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