Red Centre to Adelaide

Dinky the singing Dingo
Outback Border between Northern Territory and southern Australia
Border between Northern Territory and southern Australia

The breakaways
The breakaways
Different coloured sands that were spread throughout the region
Close up to one of the feature areas near the breakaways
Breakaways

White mounds near the breakaways

Our underground dorm room in Coober pedy

My room, i was all on my lonesome
Dog fence
Dog fence - the largest fence in the world. It prevents Dingos getting into the farms in Southern Australia
Another room next door to ours that was really creepy
Dorm Underground house
Underground house
Mine entrance
Mine
Mine


Night out at the underground bar
One of our guides and a weirdo miner

One of the perched salt lakes that litter central Australia

To get back from the outback, by flying would have cost something like 800 dollars??? It only cost 200 hundred and something to get there!!!! Qantas have a monopoly on the route from Brisbane to Alice springs and try to rip you off something rotten.

I decided to do a two day tour called the boomerang from Alice Springs to adelaide, and then fly back a day later to Brisbane for my next flight to Bangkok. The arrangements were a bit tight and so if anything was delayed or went wrong, then i would miss my flight to bangkok.

The tour was basically just a fast road trip that got us from Alice to Adelaide which was a hell of a long way. We were driving for about 12 hours a day through endless outback. There was about 15 of us in a really comfortable bus with reclining seats. We would stop every few hours for a refuel or for a stretch of the legs. We had two tour guides as one of them was in training.

Not soon after leaving Alice we had a stop for breakfast at a road house. The road house was the home to Dinky the singing dingo. He howled the way a dingo does whilst playing some notes on the piano!!! It was a really funny sight and had us all in stiches. He is actually quite famous and there is a question in trivial pursuit about him!!

Our next stop on the first day was a really lovely spot called the breakaways. They had been formed the same way that Uluru had been. They were beautiful, much more so than Uluru. We took the bus off road for a while and really raced around the dirt tracks to get a bit closer to the mountains. The off roading was good fun and the bus really good take a good hiding. It wasn't long then before we reached our overnight spot at Coober pedy. Coober pedy is the worlds centre for opal mining and some 95% of opals are mined from the vicinity of Coober. Due to the climate, most houses are made underground. They are usually formed by using dynamite and blowing huge rooms into the soft, yet strong rock. There are no supports anywhere.

The Town draws a lot of people from around the world and (I think) up to 30 nationalities are represented in the town. We were staying in a dorm room underground. The room had a comfortable temperature and felt a bit like a hospital. After settling in we went for a tour of one of the mines. The tour was really informative. We even got to go into a real home to see what an underground house looked like.

In the evening we all went out for a meal at an authentic pizza house and then onto one of the towns bars. This one was underground and full of sleazy miners. You could tell that the town is made up of mostly men!!! Me, two girls and the two guides ended up drinking far too much. We were up till the wee hours even though we had a early start!!

I overslept the next day and no one had bothered to wake me. I therefore ran around like a headless chicken whilst everyone waited for me. Nice. I had a horrific hangover for pretty much all that day. We stopped a few times on the second day. We saw the worlds longest fence which keeps dingos out of southern austalian farms, a perched salt lake - one of many that litters central Australia, and Australias longest pier (which wasnt that interesting at all). Needless to say I had an early night when we reached Adelaide.

Adelaide was a nice city. It had some really lovely old buildings around the university. There wasn't much else to see and so i thanked my lucky stars that I only had one day there. It also rained for most of the day which meant that I dont have any pictures!!!

I caught my flight to Brisbane and got there pretty late.

Uluru, the Ulgas and Kings Canyon

Camel farm, our first stop The olgas Olgas, close up

View from up in the olgas
Close up of the olgas
One of the olgas

View of the olgas

Uluru at dusk

Uluru with some weirdo spoiling the view
Sunset that first day

Sunrise at Uluru

Sunrise at Uluru
Sunrise at Uluru
Sunrise at Uluru

Sunrise at Uluru

Close up of Uluru
Close up of Uluru
Close up of Uluru
Close up of Uluru

Typical landscape surrounding Uluru

Close up of Uluru

Permanent watering hole at Uluru

Close up of Uluru
Rock art at Uluru
Uluru
Close up of Uluru

Typical green outback that we spent hours and hours driving through to get to Uluru
Camp fire at Yulara
Kings Canyon - we had to walk up that to get to the top of the canyon

View from the top of canyon

walking around the canyon
View from the canyon
View of the canyon

View from the Canyon

Waves in the sand that were at the bottom of the inland sea that have been fossilised at kings canyon
Garden of Eden at Kings Canyon

Garden of eden at kings canyon

Kings canyon

Kings canyon

View of a fresh face of the canyon after a mini collapse

I had booked a three day tour of the red centre so that I could see Uluru. The tour would be in a 4x4 van and there would be about 17 of us. We would be camping under the stars and sleeping in swags. A swags is basically a mattress in a bag.

We left really early in the morning and drove to the Olgas for our walk. The olgas are a rock formation that looks like lots of heads sticking out of the ground. The olgas, like many of rock formations in central Australia, were formed by the compressing of sand and other sediment at the bottom of the inland lake that once covered the middle of Australia. Movements in the earths crust then caused parts of this rock to be exposed and millions of years of weathering has worn the rock away into the shape it now is. The olgas is a special place for the aboriginals and so we were allowed to to walk only over a certain track of it. The walk was really good. The scenery was nice and the walk had just the right amount of difficulty.

After our walk we drove until late and we reached our first camp site for the night - Yulara. Yulara is a permanent camp site near Uluru. We headed straight for Uluru and watched the sun set whilst drinking some bubbly. The sunset was brilliant and we watched as the colours of Uluru changed in the fading night. We headed back to the camp and had some really nice food cooked by our tour guide Teegan. We had some marshmellows and drinks around the fire, under the stars.

We got up early the next morning and headed back to Uluru for sunrise. It was a really early start and we got there a little late. All the coach loads of tourists had already got there. We watched as the sun came up and changed the colour of uluru from a dirty brown to a brilliant rusted copper colour. It was definitely worth the hour of freezing and huddling. The outback got really cold at night, even though by day it was fairly warm!!

We did a walk around Uluru. Our guide recommended the half walk around the base, and that's what I did. Uluru is amazing close up and there are lots of details and features that make it really interesting. We saw some rock art and also a watering hole, right next to the rock. We then went into the nearby cultural centre and was luck enough to hear a talk from an aboriginal elder on bush food. She didn't speak much English and I think one of the centre's employees basically made up some facts as she spoke.

We then headed to our next camp site, which was near kings canyon. We did some off roading to get there and the Germans on the bus didn't like that at all. We'll, they didn't like much and pretty much didn't talk to anyone else on the bus. They also didn't do their fair share and basically came out of their tents when breakfast, lunch or dinner was called and then retired again to them once they had their fill. They didn't help cook, clean, or to make the fires like everyone else did. I tried to speak with them a few times but they gave me one word answers. I don't think i actually spotted them talking to anyone else. They also had a really rude habit of speaking when our tour guide was, even after they had been asked politely to stay quiet.

That night sleeping in our swags we heard lots of dingos and they seemt quite close. There was also a storm and that prevented most people from sleeping that night.

The next day we got up early again for a 4 hour walk around kings canyon. Kings canyon, is actually a canyon (unlike The grand canyon). We walked up a near vertical set of stairs to reach the top so that we could have a walk around the edges. The views were brilliant and we got to go down into the canyon and see the garden of edan which is a permanent watering hole. Apparently you can swim in it and around some rock in the canyon, but that wasn't offered to us? After our walk we were all knackered and headed back to Alice.

Throughout the trip I was quite surprised that the outback was actually quite green. I didn't really see swathes of red soil and the land looked quite fertile (from the bus anyways). During the tour we drove through a few cattle stations and some of them were huge. I think the biggest was the size of Belgium/Switzerland (whichever is biggest?), although i didn't really see that many cows (nor Camels - apparently there are hoards of them running wild).