The Red Center!

Ok folks, here it is... The Red Center! When I left Australia in 2005, the one thing I never did, but regretted not doing was "The Red Center" of Australia. The main attraction, of course, being Uluru, but more on that to come.
I left Adelaide at 6am and hopped on a tour bus that would take me to Alice Springs, the 'city' in the center of Australia that is the hub for going to Uluru. There really is not much between Adelaide and Alice except for a lot of driving on a lot of desert. There is, however, one town. It is called Cooper Pedy, the majority of which is underground. This town only exists because a rich opal field was found there 200 years ago or so. The heat in the desert is so bad, that the people who live there live in the old mine shafts underground!! There are some small parts of the town above ground, but mostly it is all underground. We slept that night in an underground hostel! We had a little tour in the morning, learned how opal was mined and then made pretty, then we took off straight for Alice Springs. I spent a couple of days in Alice, got to hold a joey (baby kangaroo), and then left for my trip for the rest of The Red Center.

For those of you who do not know what Uluru is, please allow me to explain. Uluru is the Aboriginal name for Ayer's Rock.
This is a huge rock that sits in the middle of Australia's outback. It has a 10km circumference and sits in the dead center of nothing but hot desert. The Aboriginals believe it to be a very spiritual place and many ceremonies used to be held here before it became a big tourist attraction. Today, you are not supposed to climb the rock out of respect, however many still do, and some even die.
I did not climb it, but simply took a 3 hour journey around the rock by myself. This was a brilliant time for me, I gathered my thoughts and enjoyed the spiritual presence that holds you there. I don't care who you are, you feel that presence when you are there. I started my walk directly after watching sunrise (we had watched sunset over the rock the night before while playing my self-made didgeridoo). and by the middle of the walk, 9 am, the heat was almost to much. There is hardly any shade and 2 liters of water is the minimum to bring. Still, it was a great way to start the day. I had traveled there with my new friend Thomas (Germany), he climbed the rock while I walked around it.
After the rock, we journeyed to a place called, 'The Olgas'. This place was wonderful as well and you could see Uluru from The Olgas, and vice versa. The Olgas was a little chain of huge rocks, or bluffs. The walk in between them is incredible and called "The Valley of the Winds" walk. We walked 5.5 km's here. If you do the math, that means I walked 15.5 km's before 11am! What a day! The rest of the day was spent driving. We picked up two more Germans along the way and the 4 of us took off for Darwin and everything in between.
There was a lot of driving on this trip, and we marveled at what the Australian's call "Road Trains"! They are these trucks that drive the distance between Darwin and Adelaide to make deliveries. They are 3 to 4 truck lengths long, are huge, and move very very fast! Here is a picture of some we saw parked at a gas station.
Our first stop was just to sleep, at a place called Ti Tree station. We had a few night caps, played some more didge, and went to bed. The next day we drove by a place called Devil's Marbles. There are perfectly huge, circular rocks here that extend as far as the eye could see! We played around a little while and then got back on the road.
We stopped at a place where apparently alien's had once landed (I think those people have been in the desert a little to long)! That night we parked on the side of the road for dinner and sleep. But half way through dinner there was a knock on our camper van door?! Who in the hell is in the middle of no where we thought. We cautiously opened the door, not knowing what to find. But it turned out all right, it wasn't any crazy desert person out to get us. Instead this knock on our door turned into the most perfectly random night and next morning ever! The person who knocked was a guy our age who worked on a cattle station, of which we were parked at the entrance of (we had no idea there was even a road there). He invited us on the station, hooked our van up with power and served us beer all night long. We talked with most of the guys working there that night. In the morning they took us on a tour of the ranch. We watched the cattle dog tear at the left overs of a cow they had taken meat from the day before. We helped herd 400 cows out of the fenced in area out to the fields! Cows are pretty stupid, and run right into each other. But the stampede was amazing to watch. Then we learned that there were 17,000 cows on that property! After we moved the cows, the owner of the property took us, one-by-one up for a free ride in his helicopter!! I have never been in a helicopter before and it was exhilarating! There were no doors on the tiny thing, and he did a few snazzy tricks in the air as well. The views from up there were AMAZING! Apparently a lot of ranchers in the area use helicopters to look after all their cattle on their many acres of land. Things have changed.
Later that day we moved on to the hot springs at Mataranka. We swam here a while. The water was definitely warm, but I wouldn't call it hot. Then we went to Kathryn's Gorge and took a small hike to some lookouts. The next day we drove to Darwin.Once I arrived in Darwin, I explored the city a bit while walking around the yachting yards and scouting out any opportunity to work on a boat going to South East Asia. Well apparently this is a bad time of the year, so no one was going. In the meantime I met up with some old friends from Adelaide, Sam and Rowland, and they put me up for a couple of nights. They took me to explore Darwin and we had a blast together catching up over some drinks. In the end I decided I had to fly out of the country before my visa expires. I have now bought plane tickets to Singapore, and leave tonight! My tour of Australia has finished and was well worth the year I spent here. I have made some amazing friends and have memories that will last a lifetime! A big thanks to everyone I met along the way for helping make the memories :) Cheers!

Pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/find.barlow/TheRedCenter# and http://picasaweb.google.com/find.barlow/Darwin#