Reasons you should visit me...

In response to rapacious demand, here are some photos from three different camp outs i've recently done! Hiking and/camping near Alice is my new favourite thing. Just get a couple of friends, something to sleep on, a couple of thermals, red wine, good food, mozzie repellant, a camera, and GO!

Pretend camping

This first one's actually a pic of two of my housemates, Alina (a kiddies doctor at Alice Springs Hospital) and Nerida (an engineer specialising in water access in remote communities) atop the hill at the end of our street. We climbed it with our dinner one night. Alice looks best from up high. I stacked it on the way down.

Camp-out number 1

My first proper camp-out experience was back in April, with Alina and her friend from Melbourne, plus Nada (a physio who grew up three blocks from me in Willougby) and her boyfriend John (a physio at the hospital - everyone knows/lives with/goes out with/works with everyone else in this town). We camped at Serpentine Gorge, below, then did Section 7 of the famous Larapinta Trail, and ended at gorgeous Ellery Creek Big Hole. That's its official name.

The view for the majority of the walk! Worth every drop of sweat and bleeding broken blister. And Fly. Ohhh the flies.

Camp-out number 2

My adventure was a little less successful! On an NT long weekend at the beginning of May, Lexi (ABC journo) Michelle (government water conservationist) and I got up at dawn and drove out to do section 9 of the Larapinta. This is a biggie. Two days, over 30km, no water or anything along the way. So with our 15kg backpacks (that's 9 1/2 kilos of water!) we headed off into the harsh centralian sunshine. The first day was hard, really hard actually, but it was worth it when we saw THIS VIEW:

Then we heard a weird noise. A plane? nah. sounds a bit like thunder...but it doesn't rain out here...umm...yeh, apparently it does. Crap.

We didn't have a rain contingency plan, on account of the whole desert-like nature of the desert. We persavered, then got to the little spot we were going to camp at to discover that there were two couples already there, and there ain't much space. We really didn't expect to see anyone else in this remote little spot. So we had to camp in the old creek bed. A plague of frogs joined us for dinner. They were cute until they insisted on jumping INTO the cooking pot and ONTO Lexi's face. One of the other campers kindly came down and lent us a spare tarp. So we fell asleep, huddled together on the sand, with the tarp covering our heads to our knees (from there downwards getting rather wet). Ahhh the relaxing sound of heavy rain on a tarp on your head! The sweet, freezing feeling of wet tarp on your face! I woke us all up at about 3am pawing at the tarp in my sleep, desperately seeking oxygen. Then it was dry and the full moon and stars were perfect. Aaahhhh.

Our fridge:

In the morning we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. How could so much go wrong? Rain? What the hell? We had our brekky and with renewed vigour took off down the creek bed, following the giant arrow. Apparently we were meant to see a tiny arrow shortly therafter, instructing us to get OUT of the creek bed and up onto a huge mountain ridge for the remainder of the trek. We didn't see it.....so walked 8 hours in the creekbed. Instead of seeing the amazing Western Macs and Mt Sonder from up high, we spent the day checking our feet, looking at camel poo and dingo tracks, avoiding GIANT spider webs and generally cursing the Shit Creek and all its tributaries.

This rock was nice though:

Camp-out number 3

Alina and I were meant to have spent this weekend just gone in Katherine, at the NT Writers Festival. It was going to take us 11 hours to drive there. We would have stayed two nights, had one full day, and taken another 11 hours to return to Alice. We were up for it! We needed an adventure! It was an excellent idea, it was. But sadly, the hospital is short-staffed, and no-one could/would cover Alina's monday shift.

Instead, we hired a 4wd, and James (housemate of John, who was mentioned much earlier on) and the two of us drove out to The Most Underrated Attraction in the Territory, Rainbow Valley. This is the spot I visited when I first got to Alice..if you remember that..but it was like a completely different place this time around because it was night, and the huge sky was clear and bright. Rainbow Valley is actually a big flat dry lake bed with this huge rock formation at the end of it, the leftovers of a very eroded mountain range made of red, white and yellow rock. It changes colour spectacularly at sunrise and sunset, as evidenced here!

Sunset! We took beers, cheese, dip and crackers and sat in the middle of the lake bed to watch.

Camping out with beer, wine, chocolate and a pumpkin:

Sunrise!! Sleeping out under the stars means waking up with the sun. So we got up, took James's little stove back to the same spot as sunset, and ate chocolate and drank tea as the sun came up.

The rest of my weekend:

Friday night was a CRACKER. It deserves a post devoted entirely to it, which will probably come tomorrow.

In summary: on Friday, every type of drink was drunk, there was trivia, a karaoke comp, dancing at two very very dubious establishments, a drunken bike ride home, three hours sleep. On Saturday? up way too early. Lawn sales (that's American for garage sales). work. kmart underpants. more work. trip to rainbow valley. Sunday: soccer. played top team. we are bottom team. two subs. three people injured = me playing despite ankle injury. ankle now paining. lost 12 nil. some more work. bath. lovely phone conversations late into the night.

COME AND VISIT ME.