Yeah, its true, no turkey for us, just got a bunch of rocks on Thanksgiving!

As we mentioned in our last entry, we used Wayward Tours for two tours, the first from Adelaide to the Red Centre and the other to go around the Red Centre. We've never had such a good time riding over 1,700 miles in 6 1/2 days!

Our tour started by visiting two of the winery areas of South Australia called the Barossa Valley and Clare Valley with a few tastings before 11AM to get things going! This area is home to the Penfolds Winery and was really pretty.

After this, we spent a lot of time just visiting with other travellers and sleeping on the bus. There were only twenty of us, so we got to know each other. We travelled through a number of really small towns and spent the night in Quorn.

During this time the scenery really changed into desert and it was hot and dry!

In Quorn we visited a pub and ended up back at the youth hostel visiting with other travellers around a campfire. We learned about the dog fence, a fence longer than the Great Wall of China used to help keep dingos away from farm animals.

We went on a hike to Alligator Gorge and the highlight of this portion of the trip was a visit to Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy is an active mining town where the heat and zeal for mining opals by the early miners created a lot of underground homes, buildings and even a church. It was weird and all the tourist stuff made it super cheezy. Here's Matt in the underground bunker we slept in. We took a tour of the mines, here is Robin looking for opals.

We also visited some desert Botanical Gardens, which were interesting and gave us a chance to get out of the minibus for a bit.

In Eldunda, we met up with another Wayward Tour group which we hooked up with for the next portion of our tour. About half of our first tour group joined up with the new tour, so we had some built-in friends for the next leg. Our new guide was Chris, who made the trip extremely interesting and super fun! The whole group really bonded and got along together very well. The group was composed of travellers from all over the world: England, Ireland, Holland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and the USA.

Up to now, we slept in bunk beds in youth hostels, however, for this next part of the trip, we slept on the red sand in canvas bags called swags. Each day we would pack up the camp in order to catch the sunrise at one rock or another. This was usually followed by a hike in the cooler am hours. By noon, it was too hot to do anything other than swim in the campground pool! The temperatures were pretty nice - in the high 30's to low 40's - Celsius, that is (over 100 F!)

Highlights of the tour included:

* our guide Chris screeching the bus to a halt, jumping out of the bus, and attempting to catch a lizard.

* driving around a parking lot 3 times singing and yelling out the windows at all the fancy tours drinking champagne at the viewing of sunset on Uluru.

* waking up each morning at 3:30-4:00 to view either Kata Tjuta or Uluru at sunrise.

* our Thanksgiving dinner of mashed potatoes, stewed tomatoes and grilled veggie sausage and salad.

* lounging in the pool and trying to explain turducken to everyone else.

*spotting the elusive "Pygmy Koala".

* speed bumps and the "shortcut" through the desert on the Giles Track.

* our hike through Kings Canyon, spotting a real kangaroo and Matt's swim in the Garden of Eden.

* the extra swim at the local swimming hole that gave us an extra two hours on our tour!

Aside from all the wonderful sights, we learned a lot about the aboriginal people because of Chris' commentary and the great intepretive materials around Uluru. We all had greater respect for this group of people who had thrived in Australia, in all climates before the white people colonized. Aboriginal people have been in Australia for about 80,000 years and came to Australia by a land bridge from New Guinea, not by canoe as was previously thought. They lived throughout Australia as a nomadic people, thriving as hunter/gatherers.
Their life was organized by Tjukarpa, an all encompassing law, religion, culture, history, ethics, daily living code which was never written down, but passed along from generation to generation. Uluru and the surrounding area have significant meaning to aboriginal people and climbing it is insulting at the very least. We opted to walk around the base instead.

Aboriginal knowledge of the land, flora and fauna is amazing. They formulated all sorts of ways to thrive in the tough climate of the desert. They knew which poisionous seeds could be eaten, as long as they were soaked in running water for 48 hours first! They knew what could be used to stun prey instead of killing it, in order for it to be brought home fresh over long distances.

After our tour ended in Alice Springs, Chris invited the whole group to his house the night after the tour for a real Australian BBQ with kangaroo, otherwise known as "skippy" on the menu! Tasty!

Note to fellow Wayward travellers, if you have any group photos from Kings Canyon, please email them to us! Our camera was fading that day..!
Thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, we loved seeing the well wishes on the blog!