Our lie-in until the late hour of 6:00 didn’t happen. The birds in the area, including the turkeys, decided that 5:20 was a much nicer time of day to wake us all up. The noise was deafening, but at lest I know the turkeys will get what’s coming to them next month. That’ll teach them. [...]

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 Our 5:45 pickup arrived at 6:20 so I could have had another 30 minutes in bed. Never mind. Again, some of the people I knew from the Cairns trip, and some from Uluru were on this one as we set off on 1500kms of northbound driving to Darwin. We had two guides this time: Carl [...]

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 Another early start, with 5am being wake-up time. We were camped very close to Kings Canyon so it was only a short journey after breakfast to this enormous natural feature, where we engaged in a 3 1/2 hour long walk. A lot of it was little stops here and there as our guide pointed things [...]

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 Today was our earliest rise of the trek – 4am. We wanted to catch sunrise at Uluru, so obviously this entailed getting up before sunrise so we could be elsewhere when it happened. We got there and, as with sunset, the view was amazing. The only problem was that, for me, we were too close [...]

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 And another early start. Several of the group I arrived in Alice with were also on this trip, a three-day trek south-west of Alice Springs and around the nearby national park. Bleary-eyed, we loaded our luggage onto the bus and set off before our bodies registered what time it was and shut down in protest. [...]

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Pretty much slap bang in the middle of Australia, now that you ask. It’s surrounded by four deserts: Simpson, Tanami, Great Sandy (what a name) and Great Victoria (which couldn’t be further away from Victoria unless it took a holiday abroad). My hostel for 2 nights now and one night when I get back from [...]

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 The morning rise was an early one, actually before sunrise. We had to be on the bus by 6am as we had almost 1000km to cover. Cereal was munched, tea drunk and we said our farewells to Mary while trying to stop the pigs making off with our bags or getting onto the coach and [...]

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 Breakfast was a simple spread of tea and toast, though at the unearthly hour of 6am. Today’s aim was to make it through 750km of ancient inland sea. Only now it’s a little drier. It began to strike me as we travelled how many creeks and rivers we drove over which were completely bone dry. [...]

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 My coach pickup for the trip to Alice Springs was at 6:15, so it was another early rise with far too little sleep. The pickup bus was actually heading to Darwin, but dropped half of us at a service station where we swapped coaches with some other people. I settled into my new seat (second [...]

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Tonight I managed to do the night dives I’d flown all the way back to Cairns for. As with the three-dive day package I did a couple of weeks ago, I was with Deep Sea Divers Den on the Sea Quest vessel. Before this, though, I was trying to sort out my Indian visa which [...]

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