I've had a lovely day today. I met my friend Kirsty, who I met in Perth, and we walked around St. Kilda. It was a bit chilly and felt like Autumn, for once. St. Kilda is lovely and the beach is pretty. There is a big street with lots of cake shops on it - yummy :)

I've finally managed to upload my pictures from the tour. It was a really good tour and was much better than I expected it to be. Seeing the rock was good, although the other bits were better as I knew nothing about them. The first things we stopped at were the Olgas, or Kata-Tjuta. They have a lot more significance to Aboriginals than Uluru does, and the dreamtime stories behind them are not allowed to be told to everyone. They are beautiful and more interesting to look at than Uluru, because they're all different shapes. That evening we went to a lookout to watch Uluru at sunset with about a million other people (I would definately recommend doing the cheap option because if you hang around for long enough after the sun goes down, you get the leftover food that the posh groups were eating with their champagne). Watching the sunset was more interesting as it was setting over the Olgas, but it was also good to see Uluru change colour. It was more noticeable the next morning when we watched it at sunrise though. All of a sudden it just glows bright orange.

That morning we walked all the way around the base of Uluru - it took us two hours and that was a bit rushed. It would have been good if we could have stopped at times to look properly because there are lots of cracks and bumps and things, and even trees growing halfway up it, and you could almost see inside it, which would have been interesting. But we were always having to keep moving throughout the whole tour, to get to the next spot before sunset or before it got too hot and so on...

The next day we climbed up to the top of Kings Canyon (up Heart Attack Hill), which was the best bit of the trip. The canyons were beautiful, and at the top it's covered in big bumpy bits which were breathtaking and not what any of us were expecting. We were all tired at the end of the tour but I have no idea how our guide kept going - she was up ealier than us (which is saying something, as we got up at 4.45am) and was driving when she wasn't helping us set up camp/cook/ or giving us a guided tour. We slept out in swags which was really cosy, although it got really cold at night and I hiked around Kings Canyon in my hat, scarf, gloves and hoody. We could hear the dingoes howling at night and they came up really close to us while we were sleeping.

It was a great tour and a lovely way to end my trip to the outback. Melbourne is a bit of a change after all that but I like it - it feels a bit like Leeds and Sheffield with all the trams and the cold...