Australian Outback Safari - Day 1-2

Our bus...taken later on our trip.

We were picked up from our hotel promptly at 5:45 to start our Outback tour.  Our bus was a fairly new, air-conditioned, 4WD vehicle seating about 15-16 people with a trailer attached to it to carry all of our bags, camping gear and food.  We would be switching campsites every night and making some pretty long drives between sites, so it was nice not to have to sit with our bags everywhere we went.  Our guide was Katie, a perky thing from New Zealand that would prove to be one of the highlights of the trip.  We were only the second people to be picked up and everyone was still pretty sleepy, so it would be much later before we really got to know the rest of our group.

Our first major stop was going to be at Ayers Rock, or Uluru as the indigenous would like for everyone to call it.  A little blurb from the brochure... "Uluru stands an imposing 348 metres above the surrounding desert and has a circumference of 9.4km. It measures 3.6 km long and 2.4 km wide oriented in an east-west direction. Rather like an iceberg, there is more of Uluru under the ground than above it which really brings home the enormity of it. "

I read somewhere that you can actually see it from space.  The biggest rock in the world.  Anyway, it was 3 hours away so we broke up the time with a few stops.  The most memorable being the camel farm.  Jake and I had decided long ago that we wanted to ride one of the many camels in the Outback (until recently, I had no idea they even had camels.  But apparently, they're abundant...left over from WWII days).  We giggled the whole time...Jake would have loved to have done the whole safari on the camel.  It was just a short ride (think pony ride at the fair), but well worth the effort (and $13).

As we drove our first few hours we were all cranning our necks out the window to see what Australia looked like.  The first time one of us spoke, it was Andy.  "This looks exactly like west Texas." 

"I thought it was very similar to Oklahoma myself,"  was my reply.  "hmmmm....."  It reminded me of our 21 day crossing to the Marquesas only to pull up to an island that looked exactly like Mexico (at least from one side).

So we were thrilled to finally arrive at Uluru and see the big red rock, which did not look like west Texas at all.  But before we could see the big rock, we stopped at our campsite to eat lunch, unload and get a little briefing.  That was when we had our first "incident."  We were just about to start to eat when we heard Jake waling.  We looked over and he was hopping around with one of his feet covered in ash.  The kid had stepped in a fire pit, used the night before and covered up in ash.  It wasn't smoldering but I have to say it was the most proper fire pit I have ever seen, complete with bricks around it and I still, for the life of me cannot believe he didn't know what it was (which is what he said).  A long story short, he ended up with first and second degree burns on his little foot.  Andy and I aside from being worried, of course, were just sure this was the end to our very expensive vacation.  With the help of some medical supplies, Dr. Andy fixed him up.  We took the wait and see approach.  After a hard hour or two (a lot of crying and wriggling), the ibuprofin kicked in and the initial shock started to wear off.  Just in time for our tour of Uluru.  We took a fairly short walking tour and learned all about the significance of the rock to the Aborigines, along with some of their creation stories.  At the end, Jake actually liked the stories better than the rock.  We finished up just in time for a sunset viewing, complete with champagne.

One of the blisters on Jake's foot.

Thousands of people come here every year to climb Uluru.

Lots of signs trying to convince people they don't want to
climb the rock.

Our guide, Katie, explaining "the kitchen."
A small cave where women used to do their
work.

I'll explain the goofy hats later.

Our first night was spent sleeping under the stars in a swag.  It's kind of like a zip up sock for your sleeping back, but has a mattress and pillow.  My first thought was that they were a little over rated (highly touted on the website, as well as by the guide and other reviewers online).  It was a little clostraphobic and I thought the bathrooms were too far away for my nightly stroll (but at least we had bathrooms).  I'm feel like a tool saying that I'm spoiled with the night stars out on the ocean, so even that was a bit less dramatic than I was hoping for.  With all of that said, we were still having a good time and extremely thankful that Jake's foot was turning out ok.

Day 2 started way earlier than I would have liked (5:00 am) to view the sunrise over Uluru.  I stayed back at camp looking for a misplaced camera, but Andy said I didn't miss much.  I guess we're a little jaded living on the boat - stars, sunsets, sunrises...it takes a lot to impress this bunch.

We were soon headed off to hike the Olgas, or Kata Tjuta.  This was a pretty lengthy hike.  I was worried about the little guy, but he hung in the full 5.whatever kilometers with barely a wimper.  As a matter of fact, he ran ahead a bit to chat up our guide throughout the hike on varying subjects, but mostly dinosaurs.  She liked kids and whether she new it or not, by appearing interested, she was instigating a weeklong friendship with Mr. Know it All (she later dubbed him her "google").

To be honest, most of the week was hiking, driving and camping so the significance of the various rocks and mountains sort of ran together in my head.  I'll let the pictures do the talking.

If you look really close, you can see a kangaroo in the middle
of the picture.  Jake got to check his "kangaroo" box.

After a few more stops and another long drive, we ended up at our campsite for the night.  This was one of the most remote places we would go.  We saw some dingos (even a baby), some wild camels and horses, and got to try out our first "bush shower."  Apparently, you light a fire to heat up the water and shower in a 3 sided structure while looking out into the wilderness.  We skipped the fire as it wasn't that cool of an evening, but enjoyed the whole outback-ness of it all.  I haven't mentioned the food yet.  While breakfast and lunch were somewhat redundant, the campfire dinners were awesome.  This night was the first night Katie, our guide made the traditional "damper" bread over the fire.  Absolutely delicious (we were lucky enough to get it every night afterwards).

Another "Where's Waldo."  See the baby dingo?

I chose to sleep in the tent at this particular campsite while Andy and Jake stayed in the swags.  Unfortunately, I had to get up in the middle of the night again and make another long trek to the bathroom.  My biggest reason for complaining is because I'm a scaredy cat.  I just new something was going to sting me, bite me, or jump on me (the bathroom was three sided to).  I got back to my tent just in time to hear a pack of dingos start howling.  They howled and howled and got closer and closer.  I've never been so glad to be back in bed.  

A chipper 6:00 am wake up call had us up and moving getting ready for our next day's hike...Kings Canyon.

Some random pictures from some of our various stops between major sites...

Jake took this picture.  Cool little thing on one of our lunch stops.
We're arguing over wether it's a perentie or a goanna.

Funny little Emu.

A salt lake that was way more interesting than I thought
it would be.

Jake gathered some salt for his dinner.

 Hopefully I'm leaving you full of suspense, like your favorite soap opera.  If not, you're probably at least glad that I'm done for the day....only one more post left to wrap up this self proclaimed epic tale...

G'day Mate!

Warning:  The next few posts will be about our Australia trip.  There are so many pictures and stories we want to share with our families, but I’m afraid we’ll lose everyone else if I post them all here at once.  So hopefully, you won’t find this too tedious.  We had a fantastic time and just want to share that with those who give a crap…..  Enjoy (if you give a crap).

As I said in my last post, according to Jake, the only reason he came sailing with us was to “go to Australia.”  He wanted to see a Kangaroo.  As we made the decision to go downwind from the Marshall Islands, we pretty much made the decision not to sail to Australia.  At some point you get too far west and the only options to sail there are not very comfortable (some will disagree, but I would place bets that they haven’t heaved over the rail as much as I have).  So we made the decision to fly to Australia.  Andy was there 20 years ago, but I had never been and well, of course Jake was up for it.  It took weeks to decide what to do.  We finally decided, if our budget and time only allowed for a few weeks, we were going to do what we would consider the “Australian” thing…we were going to the Outback.  So we signed ourselves up for a 5 day, 4 night camping Safari. 

Getting to the Outback from Kuching is not as easy or as cheap as many led us to believe.  To save a little money, we decided to spend a night in Darwin (I know that sounds counter productive, but planning our own flight connections proved to save us thousands of dollars, even with the extra hotel rooms).  Our flight landed at 4:15….in the morning.  Since our hotel room wasn’t ready (some old bloke still sleeping there, no doubt), we waited for sunrise in the restaurant and then went for a walk about. 

Our first impressions and realization that we weren’t in SE Asia anymore was the sheer number of white people.  We had actually grown quite comfortable being in the minority and not speaking the language.  You get to hide in the background knowing no one is talking to you and you get to pretend to be anonymous all the time.  Once we arrived in Australia, everyone was speaking English and you had to actually pay attention, because well, they’re friendly and they actually talk to you.  “G’day Mate!”  “No worries Mate!”  “Where are ya from Mate?”  These Mates were all talked out in the first day!  We were also taken aback when told to put our seat belts on..."seat belts?  what's that?"

So back to the walk about…we only had a day in Darwin, so we did a nice sunrise walk on the Esplanade and as soon as the pubs started serving pints, we bellied up to the waterfront bars and wondered what it would have been like to sail our boat into the harbor.  In the end, we decided it would have been bloody expensive and a pain in the arse!  Happy to be passing through (we spent $200 in the first 3 hours with our taxi ride, breakfast and the aforementioned pints).

Seriously...the biggest paella I've ever seen.

So I can see this will get lengthy if I tell every opinion we had, so I’ll skip ahead to our trip to the Mindil Beach Market.  Apparently, this is a very Darwin thing to do and we happen to be there on the right day of the week.  It wasn’t too far from our hotel so we walked to the beach and marveled at all the food stalls, artwork, and entertainment.  We even saw a velvet Elvis, I kid you not.  We ate our way through the stalls….oysters, paella (take a look a the picture…incredible), lamb kabobs, grilled fish, and of course ice cream.  We watched the sun set and made our way back to the hotel room.  After an early morning wake up call to the tune of a fire alarm, we made sure we were on our 7:00 flight to Alice Springs.  One day closer to the Outback….

They're pretty darn proud of their croc catching skills...
I have to say Jake was impressed.

Other items impressed Andy...bloated frogs holding liquor bottles.

Alice Springs was much bigger than we had expected but you could tell we had crossed some sort of climate, terrain, and cultural line.  Our hotel was kind enough to check us in early and we promptly took advantage of the air condition and cushy beds. 

We spent a day and a half touring the city before our “adventure” began.  We spent some time at the reptile museum where we got a sneak peak of some of the creatures we would be seeing throughout the week.  Jake and I got to hold a python – probably the highlight of the museum – and we saw some of the coolest lizards we’d ever come across.  When we made it back to our hotel, we were met with a peacock…yep.  I have no idea why the Doubletree has a peacock strutting his stuff around the grounds, but they do.  Pretty neat.  We ordered Dominos for dinner (because we could…haven’t seen Dominos in years out on the boat), and turned in early in anticipation of our 5:00 wake up call (this would prove to be a trend throughout the week).  Stay tuned….

One of the many venomous snakes in Australia.

Another "can kill ya" snake.

These were supposed to be everywhere, but wouldn't you know
we picked the one place in Australia where they're  hard to find.
Kind of like the Kangaroo (not kidding...more on that later.)

The bearded dragon.  We actually saw one of these in the wild
later in the week.

Thorny devil...saw one of these in the wild as well.

Not so rare for us as we're sitting in a croc infested river in Kuching,
but cool none the less.

Jake's newest snuggle buddy...it's on the list for
"when we get a house, can I have a pet?"

Not to be outdone by my son....

Wonderful lunch complete with kangaroo pizza...only $74!
What a bargain!

Don't ask...I don't know....