Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Beyond The Alice

It's 4am. At some point during the night the rain subsided, but we were not awake to remember it. After 500k / 6 hours of traveling from Alice Springs, we were within 10k before the skies opened up. This in a place that is supposed to be one of the driest on earth.

Our little Wayward Bus was blown to fro by a driving wind, causing or guide and driver, 'Mackie' , to navigate like he was intoxicated. On this tour, we've accounted for 4 Swiss, 2 Canadians, 3 Aussies, 1 Irish, 1 Japanese and us three Amer-I-cans. The sheer amount of water on the ground has scattered the group to all corners of the campsite, I slept in the laundry room, the girls under the dining tent, others in the shower.

About a half dozen of us rolled out our swagmans in the laundry room, several were on a tour separate from ours. I slept next to a guy from China who snored the entire night. The girls initially tried a tent, but then picked the whole thing up and pitched it under the corrugated tin roof of the dining hall. The lightning storm was pretty intense as well, giving us all a reason to count our blessings.

We pulled into camp at about 7:30pm last night and tried to get a glimpse of Uluru, which wasn't anything spectacular given the cloud cover, but today we're attempting a sunrise hike around the base. Although, our guide has just announced that we will be changing our itinerary a bit since the sun won't be coming up. I think that if the sun indeed ceased to rise, we'd be in a lot more trouble than just missing a morning hike.

posted by ncawthon at 6:15 AM