Red Center Day 1

After my last post, I walked out onto the street just in time to watch this crazy parade going on for some music festival hapening during ht enext few days. There were lotsof crazy costumes and drumming music and all sorts of visual stuff. Tres Cool. Afterwards, I went back to the hostel and ate dinner with 2 Israelis I met, Liat and Yuval. After dinner we all walked over to the music festival and Saturno joined us. We ended up watching the last act called the Super Railene Brothers. I t was quite and interesting pair of guys playing folk music with one playing a violina nd the other a guitar and a stomp drum. Everyone there just went wild and started dancing. I liked it since all the songs were about Alice Springs and Australia.

Now to the juisy stuff:
This morning I got to sleep in since the bus ony came to pick us up at 11:30am. The tour guide was Angus and right away I could tell he was going to be a cool guy.

Our first stop was a very important stop at, wait for it... LIQUORLAND! Every loaded up on booze for the trip since its cheaper in Alice then out in the outback. We then made our way to the airport to pick up two more passengers.

Our first official stop was in Erldunda where I bought my first sticker for this trip. Once we were on the road again, while looking out the window, instead of seeing ht ecommon cow, we started seeing wild camels. Yes, there ARE camels in Australia. They were brought over as work horses and some how got loose. Now there are approximately over a million camels in Australia.

The rest of the day was all driving except for a quick stop at Mt. Ebiniezer truck stop and then another stop for firewood.

On the bus, angus made us go on the microphone and introduce ourselves. This group consisted of:
Myself
Peter, a tour guise in training
Chris and Kat, two german girls travelling together
Janina, a geran girl who had a terrible sounding cough
Charly, an older (47) german guy
Ben and Yuki, a british and japanese girl traveling together
Darren, an english bloke
Francois and her friend from France
Russell and Katie - a couple form England
Noriko, another japanses girl who happened to go to the same uni as Yuki
3 more japanese whose names I never got (one was named Tucker I think)

Eventually, by the end of the day, we made it to the Kings Canyon Resort where we set up camp. we made a huge camp fire and ate spaghetti with meat sauce and mashed potatoes for dinner. I got to play some guitar by the camp fire and made an effort to try out some new stuff I printed off before the trip.

Drank some wine and then headed for bed which was my sleeping bag inside a swag to help keep out the cold air while asleep.