Continued from previous blog....

We had some chill out time in Melbourne and stayed there 3 nights but the weather was as bad as an Irish winter so most of the time we sat in cafes and looked out at the rain! Going by Lonely Planet's guide to Melbourne, cafes and bars are where we should spend most of our time while visiting so we followed their advice! We did manage to take a day to visit the street where Neighbours is filmed which ended up being miles outside the city and a bit of a trek so by the end of it Ger was calling it a pilgrimage! That night we went to the Neighbours trivia night, met some of the cast and saw Karl Kennedy's band, a definite highlight of Melbourne for me...all the boyfriends that were dragged along seemed to love it too!

We flew from Melbourne into the 'Red Centre' as the Aussies call it, to a place called Alice Springs.It's in The Northern Territory and is surrounded by deserts so the sweat was dripping off us as soon as we got off the plane! There is not much in the town itself; it's basically used as a base for visiting Uluru/Ayers Rock. On the map it looks as if Uluru is just down the road from Alice but it's actually about 500Km away!

We did a 3 day tour from Alice and visited some great places on the way to the rock. Kings Canyon is Australia's version of the Grand Canyon...it's not quite as big but is really beautiful and was our first stop off point of the tour. Hiking through it in 35c heat tired us all out so it was nice to chill out with some cheap wine under the stars afterwards. We camped outside in swags (kinda like waterproof sleeping bags with a mattress inside) with only a camp fire to keep us warm. I was a bit apprehensive about sleeping outside with the bugs, snakes, dingoes and cows!! Luckily it was only the cows that were close by during the night and we both loved the bush camping experience. Day 2 was very busy with a walking tour of another sacred rock formation, also gigantic, known as the Kata Tjuta Olgas before we reached the famous rock itself, Uluru. Lots of you will have seen the classic picture of the rock but to see it up close was really spectacular. As part of our tour our guide explained a lot about the Aboriginal People that lived close to the rock and about how the rock was a sacred place to the Aboriginals. It plays a really important role in their history and beliefs.

Uluru is truly immense standing at approximately 350m high with a circumference of 9.4 km and because it is in the middle of the desert away from everything else it stands out like a bright beacon. We finished our second day by watching Uluru change different shades of red and grey as the sun set behind us. Our second night was spent under the stars again but this time it wasn't in the company of cows....more like wild dogs! Ger unfortunately woke up the next morning to find that one of his runners had been stolen by a hungry dog! We rose at approx 5 am to catch the sun rising behind The Rock. We enjoyed breakfast close by and then walked around the whole Rock to see it from every angle possible! On the way back to Alice we stopped at a camel farm for a quick lap on the back of a grumpy camel. It turns out that Aussies imported camels from the middle east back at the start of the 20th century to help them transport stuff through the desert. Once cars, trucks and trains came along, camels were no longer needed so they were released into the bush and now roam wild throughout the outback. Some people farm them and race them.

East coast next....more stories and pics to follow!

Love to all, Linda and Ger xxx