Once our cameras were full and our memories had been etched in our minds from our stay in Yulara, we were off further North to Kings Creek for another evening of camping…this time in tents that were a thousand degrees. Upon arriving, I helped collect some firewood and got us into trouble for dragging dead trees from one area down the road to our campsite. I wasn’t aware that what we were doing was illegal, so I wasn’t very good at hiding my tracks (Josh was warned by the Park Ranger not to do it again, and that he knew it was us because he followed the tracks from where the trees were dragged from the forest back to our campsite – oops!). With a pile of wood ready for the evening, we had a quick swim at the pool, made dinner, and enjoyed it by the fire with some s’mores to top off the evening. I never knew that North America was the only continent fortunate enough to enjoy s’mores until I came here and no one else had even heard of them. Unfortunately, the Australian marshmallows aren’t very good, and they don’t have graham crackers so we had to supplement with chocolate-covered Digestive crackers. Luckily, the s’mores were good enough to show the Europeans along on the trip the potential of this delicious treat! It was then early to bed since we were all tired from the early mornings in Yulara – despite being dead tired, I didn’t get much sleep because I was sweating and could hear Dingoes outside our tent all night – as much as I would have loved a snuggle with a dog, I also wanted to make it out of there alive!
The next morning we headed to Kings Canyon, another sacred sight for the local Aboriginals, to hike through what felt like the scene from a Jurrasic Park movie - I wouldn't have been surprised if we came across a few dinosaurs on our walk. I’m not sure why, but it was one of my favourite places that we went on our trip (despite what seemed like never ending stairs at the beginning of the hike and the billions of flies) – the rocks were layered in a way that seemed like they could have only been hand-placed and not naturally created, you were surrounded by huge walls of rock that made you feel insignificantly small, and there were large cliffs that served as a reminder as to just how powerful nature can be (although the views over these cliffs were beautiful, you didn’t want to get TOO close or you would have joined the unlucky few who didn’t make it out of Kings Canyon alive). There were also few lizards sunbathing along our walk, with one of the highlights of our hike being two having what seemed like a game of tag before having a little ‘fun’ with each other…and we all watched (any sight that was something other than red rocks at this point was very exciting to us!). Perhaps all of those things combined with the fact that we were all a bit hyper/crazy that morning were what added to my favoritism towards this place.
After filling our water bottles, drying our sweat, and using the bathroom, we were back on the road for a long drive to Alice Springs where we would all enjoy a fun night out in this ‘interesting’ (to say the least) town. After a late night with a few drinks, we all enjoyed a rest day in Alice Springs the following day. It was the first day since the tour started that we didn’t have to set an alarm, there was nothing on our schedule, and we didn’t have to get on the bus to go anywhere. Because Alice Springs has some interesting characters and there isn’t much to do around the town (this perhaps explains the interesting characters and why they are all drunk at all times of the day), most of us took advantage of this day to contact home to let family know we were surviving the Outback, catch up on some reading, do some laundry, or just enjoy a nap without the need to worry about waking up in time for some scheduled activity.