Sunday 8 December 2013

Kings Canyon and a long journey back

Chris came and politely woke us all at 4am, so we went and got ready, pulled our swags up to the eating area and got on the bus to leave promptly at 5am. The plan for this morning was to do the walk at Kings Canyon as early as possible as it was supposed to reach very high temps by 11am, then we'd come back to camp, have bacon and eggs and a chillout sesh by the pool before packing up and heading back to Alice Springs. 

Along the half hour drive to Kings Canyon, we found a whole load of swags along the road?! So we stopped to pick them up, turns out another tour group hadn't strapped them down very well and had lost around 5 of them!! haha! When we arrived at Kings Canyon we were there just as the sun was starting to rise which was pretty awesome. We'd made sandwiches the night before for breakfast on the go, so we ate them before we started our hike. But found out no-one had made Chris or Luke any sandwiches (we'd run out of bread I think) so we never heard the end of that! But a few people donated their second sandwiches so they had something to eat!

The hike up was pretty steep! It took us a good half hour to get up but once we did we were rewarded with spectacular views across the canyon, with the sun coming up. We then proceeded on our 5km hike - which took us around 3 hours with stop-offs and a trip down to Eden's Garden, a water hole. It was constant ups and downs, as you'd expect with a walk across a canyon! It was a lot like a very small version of the Grand Canyon. We finished our walk around 10am when it was just starting to get very hot, and we then made our way back to camp.

A few of us went and jumped in the pool before having showers, and then we all helped cook a hard-earned breakfast - bacon and scrambled eggs - delish! And helped with rolling away the swags. Then it was time to say goodbye to Kings Canyon and hello to the long journey back to Alice Springs - around 4hrs - via a stop off at the service station again. We slept on and off and had some fun between us - there was always huge bouts of giggles and laughter coming from our end of the bus! Everyone took selfies of themselves for Chris on his camera - obviously we took it one step further and got a bit silly, plus took a selfie of teddy's on the bus.

We arrived at Alice Springs at 6pm and were to meet for dinner at our hostel's bar at 7.30pm. So we checked into our new room, which we were sharing with the same German guy as our first night and a weirdo french dude who later that evening suggested my teddies meet his teddies and have a romance...errrrr I'm weird but not THAT weird!

Dinner was fun and we all had a laugh, particularly when Hayley knocked her drink over and then ended up pushing it over Andrew! haha Bex had a migraine so she went to bed around 10pm but me and Andrew stayed up with Hayley, Chris, Helen and a few others. Our main source of entertainment was the budding hook up between Luke and one of the spanish girls who he'd been flirting outrageoulsy with during the whole of the tour, they did end up hooking up which surprised us as she didn't seem keen on tour (she even switched places with her friend when Luke sat next to her the first camp night dinner). But obviously she now was keen and they disappeared for quite a while. Andrew went on a mission to try and find out where they went, and ended up walking past them getting it on outside - awkward. They came back later and we quizzed them but failed to get any details from them, grrrr.

I danced on the tables obvs, after Chris got us a load of shots, followed by Hayley and then Andrew, who we had to navigate around the ceiling fan...to which he, once on the table, then started dancing towards the OTHER fan on the other side of the table. We were all shouting at him to stop but he kept shuffling backwards oblivious to the very dangerous fan blades coming ever dangerously close to his neck, until Giovanni shouted out to Andrew to look behind him, saving his life! 

The bar closed at 1am and as we had an early checkout in the morning we went to bed around midnight. Andrew and I perhaps made a little too much noise when we got in, waking everyone up, but meh, it was only midnight afterall!

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