The Ghan, Line Dancers, Massive Old Rocks and A Bit Of A Large Canyon

Hia! Ok so next update of the travels...

I have done the following things so I can tick them off my bucket list:

• Travelled on a train for over 25 hours
• Met real life line dancers
• Been to Uluru and learnt about aboriginal culture
• Sat on the very edge of the cliff at Kings Canyon
• Been to a camel race

What a bloody busy time I have had I tell you. I will keep it brief because I have SO much to catch up on but this week of being in Alice Springs was great and it was all thanks to a group of "oldies" I met on The Ghan and The Rock Tour's group and group leader.

I put oldies in quotation marks because they are far from it in spirit. I believe they were all aged between 60 and 80, there were 11 of them, and they all know each other because they have line danced with each other for years.. how amazing is that! They kept me properly entertained on what would have otherwise been a grueling 25 hour train ride with lude remarks about fellow male travellers, by teaching me how to play yatzee, telling me all about their lives and how many kids, grandkids and great grankids they have, and just overall being awesome. They were such good fun. I nearly shat myself at one point though.. Trish who was sat next to me on this sleeper train was fast asleep - as was 97% of the train - and I was just about to doze off myself when from nowhere, Trish turns in her sleep, leans over me and goes "HAHAHA!" right in my face before settling back down and going straight back to sleep. Immediately wide eyed, mouth open in horror stance, body facing and arms clinging to wall with head almost owl liked swivelled to face my night time goblin I started to breathe again. I didn't go to sleep for the rest of the night though.. seriously.

Me and the crew on The Ghan

Alice Springs is an odd place. It's nice and full of vibe but it's also a bit scary because of the amount of drunk aboriginal people there are. This will sound horribly racist but it's fact - the drunk ones shuffle towards you like zombies. It is really, really creepy and I didn't like it at all. Their hands and arms dangle loosely by their sides, their mouths are drooped open and drooling, and they just shuffle without picking up their feet. And almost most of them have dirty damaged clothing on which really emphasises the zombie look.. I know for a fact not all aboriginals in Alice Springs are drunks but I didn't see any.... such a shame.

Me in the crack of Alice

But I didn't go to Alice Springs to check them out.. I came to do what ever single other backpacker does and that is go to Uluru. The trip started amazingly well - Matt (tour guide from Leeds.. ANOTHER LEEDS SIGN!) ran over a kangaroo. The thud was sickening..They are bloody big animals they are!! Poor kanga..

Sun setting in front of Uluru.. Beer in hand

The rest of the tour was brilliant though. The rock was lovely and the stories that go with it were quite sweet... ridiculous in our culture of course and you have to remember they are childrens stories. We weren't told any adult stories because quite simply, only the very high ranking members of the aboriginal society know them.. we white europeans aren't privvy.. which makes it all the more frustrating!! I want to know what secrets this rock holds and why it is sacred. Did you know that the stories behind it have not been written down by aboriginal people and that the majority of the rock has never been photographed/published because you can't take photos of the sacred parts?? I didn't. But if you think about it, it makes sense. I bet you have only really seen the one side of Uluru in the pictures.

Uluru at sunset

We saw Uluru during the day, at sunset and again at sunrise. Sunrise was my favourite I think.. sunset it's meant to change colours and someone told me glimmer... that so doesn't happen. A shadow descends which is why the colour "changes" and there was no shimmery shinyness. Buggers.

We couldn't go to Kata Tjuta on day two because the "controlled" bush fires were out of control... which was a bit gutting but it didn't matter really because instead we went witchetty grub hunting! FUCK-INGGGGG gross is what they are if any of you were wondering. Aboriginal women.. and therefore us for the day.. would go to a specific tree, dig up its roots and look for a bulge in them. If there was a bulge, they were rip the root out and there inside would be a grub (which is the larvae of a moth). I had fun digging until my digging stick snapped in half and went straight through my thigh. That really hurt. And there was blood.

Clever photography by Matt, I am being pulled out of Nutella

Kings Canyon was absolutely stunning. Breath taking doesn't really sum up. We climbed it in the dark before sunrise so we could watch it come up over the canyon. Even in the dark it was beautiful. I of course took some posey ones and my favourite was me sitting on the very edge with a massively massive drop below. It looks like I might have been there for hours pondering and being mysterious.. what really happened is I ran over there lobbing my camera at another woman on the tour and shouted back "take a photo of this would you!!", almost fell down before striking a pose. 7 seconds later I was back on my feet running to get my camera, very pleased with the result. Wish I could have stayed longer but ah well. Tours must stick to schedules and had I stayed longer I really would have been blown by the wind off the cliff. I would have been blogging with 78 broken bones I would imagine.

 Sitting on Kings Canyon

I also, very luckily, got to be in town for the annual Camel Cup race, which is horse racing but with camels. BRILLIANT idea! Matt was taking part so figured I would go check it out and had a good time watching him being full on launched off. Panicked for a moment as I thought he was dead but mayyyy have had a wee giggle when I realised he wasn't paralised ;-P sorry Matt xx

Matt's camel.. minus Matt

And then it was off to Darwin.. back on The Ghan with my line dancers... but that's another blog.

Cheerio.

Adelaide: Trains, Kangaroo Island, Asian Head Slamming, Flu

*coughs in your face*/rasp – Hello. How are you? I'm fine. Apart from carrying the plague but you know, stiff upper lip all English style. Wouldn't want to complain would we. Except I will... I have a cough. I have had a cough which affects my ability to speak like a normal person for around 3 weeks now and I blame it entirely on sleeping in freezing cold conditions. Despite what everyone in England thinks, Australia gets COLD and I have been sleeping in what is effectively a shed. And when I say sleeping, I mean closing my eyes every few minutes post cough. I'm tired. Oh so very tired.

But besides that I have news! I have officially started my tour of Australia – woot! I no longer have an employer, I am free to roam as I please (as long as it stays within the timetable I have made for myself) and I am ready to explore!

My first stop was Melbourne to see my bestest good Australian friends :) one was packing up to move so couldn't see him for too long but the others were the most wonderful hosts – I cannot thank them enough for just being wonderful and accommodating, and also for owning the worlds most comfortable settee. Corrrr and blimey that sucker would have had me for weeks if I wasn't forced to move! We saw the Science Works museum where they had a Wallace and Gromit exhibition on and it reminded me of home so much. They had Weeabix and proper English stuff – Rodney had never heard of W&G before... he was nearly shot on sight. He shall be educated.

Before I knew it, I was on The Great Overland choo choo train. Full of expectations, I thought I would be boarding a luxury train carriage full of fancy dressed people and tea and sandwiches!!.... No. It was just a train with slightly more leg room and sandwiches on sale for $2.00. Slight let down.

The next stop though was Adelaide, SA, which stands for Snooze Avenue (not South Australia as you might have thought). You know if you were to go into town and go to the supermarket or into a clothes shop.. in Adelaide that strip of shops is classified as a tourist attraction, the place is THAT dull. And I'm not kidding – you can look it up in the Lonely Planet guide for proof. I also went to the museum which was kind of cool but mainly fucking boring. I like big displays of mummies or space information or bottled up weird conjoined foetuses!! But instead what I got was 3 floors of aboriginal weaving. I am 100% all up for learning about aboriginal culture and philosophy.. but THREE solid floors of baskets made from different types of reed?! No ta!

And that was the sum total of Adelaide. There is nothing else to do there unless you drink wine and want to take an overly expensive tour to some wineries, what with SA being wine capital of Aus. I did meet some interesting people though. One was a Canadian girl who I am SO sure is actually famous in disguise. I just know her. So sure of it. The other was a Welsh girl from Swansea who has rather jealous makingly become a permanent resident. And the other was a Spanish girl who dressed all hippy like, had a big ring in her nose and who you would think maybe worked on a ganja growing farm. Looks can be deceiving though! It turns out she's not only really bloody clever but she's working on a project for the next 3 years measuring frogs!! FROGS! With tape measures and everything!! It's amazing the type of people you get to meet as you travel.

The best bit of SA though was Kangaroo Island. Whilst it would definitely have been a billion times better in the summer so I could have gone snorkelling and surfing, it was still absolutely wonderful. The tour guide, Greg, was such a legend that I have every intention of sending a letter to Adventure KI to pass on to him so he has my details. I would marry him big time – I'd potentially make him have a shave down to designer stubble instead of full blown face bush, but I'm sure we can discuss that closer to the wedding. Such a nice man.

He took us to a wool shed where we learnt how to sheer sheep, we went to an emu farm for dinner and a proper good sniff of emu oil (did you know that stuff does everything?!? Like you can clean pans with it, heal cuts with it, remedy colds.. I'm sure there is a cure for cancer in an emu), I sat in a carriage to watch a DVD, an idea that I will definitely be taking home – next time you guys come over and spend some time in my garden, you will be sitting in an old horse carriage with a garden big screen TV. For shiz.

We also saw real life in the wild seal and sealions which was very cute. However.. for some bizarre reason I have developed a real alarming fear of slugs. This fear has come FROM NO WHERE and has been tormenting me for about 5 weeks now. Completely new, completely out of the blue, completely disturbing. I am dreaming about them, I'm looking at and around everything before I sit down for them, and now I am seeing them in things that aren't them.. for example, the sealion. See I just got goosebumps just writing about it!! They look like giant slugs and because they move REALLY quick, this gives sealions an added horror element to the overall looking like a slug dread... so in summary I am now also semi petrified of sealions. Soon I won't be able to enter a zoo.. elephants will look like them.. zebras will be stripy slugs.. I'm even going off hotdogs because the shape resembles them slightly! Stupid irrational brain :(

We saw other animals like koalas and kangaroos which of course were lovely but my favourite thing to watch out of everything there, were the Chinese.

Oh... Oh God how I wish you had been there. On the second day I sat right at the back so I could observe the bus sea of Chinese, and it was the best laugh ever. Next time you are on a tour, have the tour guide say to the Chinese “we will be driving now for around 45 minutes so sit back and relax”, because I can guarantee you by the time he gets up to “min” in minutes, the Chinese have fallen asleep. Those Chinese can sleep for an Olympic gold. Every time they sat down **BOOM** asleep. At park benches to have lunch, because they were sat down their friends were taking it in turns with each other to nudge, half ham slice to mouth awake. But they are SO wonderful at falling asleep that even when they have been slightly tilted to one side by the bus going around a corner, they just don't wake up and continue to fall!!!

There must have been a good 30-40 instances where I was sat at the back of the bus, knees to my chest, hands wrapped around my sides to help ease the pain, with tears rolling down my face because the Chinese were head butting each other. And one Chinese bloke ahead of me had the most giant head ever, and every time he clonked someone elses head it made a really loud wood on wood noise. Oh seriously, it was to the point I had to take HUGE deep breaths to stop being hysterical. And one Chinese lad forgot to put his arm rest up and was sat on an aisle seat – THREE times he fell asleep, let his heavy massive head sway a few times before falling head first into the aisle. Simply the best bus ride yet.

I love him so...

We also went to these rocks called Remarkable Rocks – called so because they are. The Australians like to name as they see which is why I am so surprised their children aren't called things like “bump in road” or “matured foetus”. We had a good play on those – Greg making me pretend I had been trapped under a bolder and for a photo, made it look like he was trying to rescue me... oooh I wish I could be rescued by Greg... swoooon... He is 49 and all manly and gruff. I have a major crush on this bloke. I stayed out with him whilst he was cooking to share a beer and talk about life and philosophy and we shared stories and passions and meaningful glances.... Such a nice man!

And then it was home on the ferry :( to cold Adelaide. I missed Greg immediately and started to fantasise about snuggling up in his beard. Such a nice man.

But not to worry, it was only for one more night before I was off to Alice Springs... further blogage to follow :-P