Early start today, 5am. Yes, although it doesn't look like based on the waking up time, I still am on a holiday. :-)
We checked out and went to the meeting point (The Adventure tours Adelaide office). This seems to be a popular excursion so we have 2 buses going to Alice Springs. Although each bus only has about 14 passengers or so and they go at different times so we'll only meet with the other passengers at dinners and breakfast, if that!
Which is a good thing, you don't want to be queueing up for everything.
The whole trip is about 3000 Km, so there'll be a lot of driving involved. Below is a group photo taken in Alice Springs.
Front row from left to right:
Isabelle (German), Bee (The Guide, New Zealand), Chloe (UK), Linda (Sweden)
Middle row from left to right:
Aída (Spain), Mary Anne (Australia), Veronica (Italy), Ophelie (France), Suzy (Germany), Melanie (Australia), Jade (Scotland), Joshphine (Sweden), Sylvia (Germany)
Top row from left to right:
Marco (Italy), Yours trully, Lee (Scotland) and Manu (Germany)
We left Adelaide and after an hour or so we stopped for breakfast and after that, the next stop was a village called Melrose with some odd looking mobile homes. Now, when I use the word mobile home everyone has a picture of one in mind...I would be willing to bet that your mental picture looks nothing like these:
Apart from the 2 floor mobile homes they also had a swinging bridge so with nothing better to do we went to take a few pictures there.
Then we kept driving until we reached the place where we are going to spend the next 2 nights. It is in a sleepy village called Quorn. The place used to be a Mill that some time ago got reconverted into a hotel and at some point last year Adventure Tours bought it and now they use it exclusively for their excursions. It's quite nice although the village is one of those sleepy villages that makes you wonder whether someone lives there or not... Everything was shut after 4pm.
We left our stuff and went for a walk to Warren Gorge. This was a nice and easy walk, mostly flat but you can see how this area is much drier than the places where we went for walks in the past, further south.
There were lots of flies everywhere! Look at Aída's rucksack.
We found a nasty looking spider which I captured with my camera for your viewing pleasure only
and they also have some nasty ants that kept bitting us all the time...but we weren't the only thing they were biting (if you are eating, you better skip the next picture, trust me!)
Although we thought there were lots of flies we've been told this is nothing and the further north we go the more flies we get. Aída and I knowing this, bought some insect nets to put on our heads back in Melbourne...Apparently, flies are seeking moisture...and they love your nouse, mouth and ears...According to the guide, you always end up eating 2 or three with lunch, but that's good because it increases your protein intake. There are a lot of people in Europe paying good money for protein milkshakes...maybe there is a business on this... ;-)
After that we went to have dinner, made an effort to memorise everyone's names and nationalities (which for some reason it's becoming increasingly easier with each excursion), played some card games and went to bed since some people wanted to go camel riding in the morning.
We were warned that our next door neighbour is the local police officer and his wife is always complaining about the noise the different groups make so we were told not to go outside after 10 pm. Nonetheless We had gotten up so early today in the morning that by 10pm we were all on our first dream...
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