Our long haul flight from Singapore had just touched down when the pilot asked - ´We have now landed in Sydney?´.´Well, mate´, I thought, ´you should bloody well know! Engage map and brain before landing gear, eh?` Then it struck us (years of Neighbours and Rolf Harris should have made clear from the start) we were in Australia, everyone inflects the end of their sentences, just to confuse Pommies.

We spent the night in Sydney and then got straight back on a plane to fly the 4 hours to the absolute middle of nowhere which also happened to be right in the middle of Australia. Where is nowhere? Alice Springs of course.

Alice Springs itself is a bit of an odd place. A small, slightly run down town with lots of cheap shops and a bit of a drink problem. The population is around 37% aboriginal and there is pretty much nothing else around for hundreds of miles, unless you count the red, dusty desert and Kangaroos. Alice Springs has it's problems, you shouldn´t really walk around by yourself at night we were told and it is a bit of a depressing place but it is not all bad. This was a place where guys who looked like Crocodile Dundee in their leather hats walk past aboriginies selling traditional arts on the street. What struck us after talking to some of the locals was their strong sense of heritage and of being Australian. These cattle ranchers who live miles away from anything except each other are proud of their roots - aboriginal or European and the achievements of their predecessors. What surprised us the most was how distinct Australian culture here was. Australia is (wrongly) not somewhere we ever really associated before with being all that different from home.

Anyway, unlike the last paragraph, we got straight to the point and left Alice Springs the next day on a tour which would see us sleep two nights in the desert while trekking to Kings Canyon, The Olgas and Ayres Rock (Uluru). We got on the bus and met our guide for the next few days, ´Rat´, a more Australian Australian I can´t imagine and a guy with a great interest and respect for aboriginal culture. Along with Rat we met the rest of our tour - all, with the exception of 2 people, German. Great, you leave Asia to come to Australia and you still can´t understand a word of what anyone is saying!

The first day was excellent, we drove for hours spotting Red Kangaroos bouncing in the distance until we reached the famous Kings Canyon, so called because it is a canyon (not sure of the kings bit though). We went on a walk for the next few hours looking at the unbelievably dry and red surroundings and thanking the weather for being cool (normally around 45 degrees this time of year). We finished the walk and made our way to camp for the night.

When I think camp I think tent. Maybe Caravan. Aussies think Swag. We´d heard of them from Waltzing Matilda but we didn´t actually know what one actually was. It turns out that it´s basically a big sleeping bag with a thin mattress attached to one side and a hood on the top. You roll it up and carry it around with you until you want to sleep in the Bush at which point you just unroll it, lay on the floor and get in it. No tent, no cover, just a bag.

Australian has more poisonous snakes and spiders than any other nation in the world.

Our guide could only provide the reassurance that he had done this loads of times and wasn´t dead yet...but his friend?

To cope we all sat around a big campfire eating damper bread (a traditional bread cooked in the embers of the fire) and a chilli cooked up in a massive stew pot. All full up we made our way to our bags of (potential) poison and fell asleep under one of the clearest night skies I have ever seen, stars everywhere due to the complete lack of light pollution.

Unfortunately, we also woke up under one of the clearest night skies I had ever seen. 4am and apparently we had to get up (only 3 hours after going to bed!) to go and see sunrise. I don´t get sunrises, to me they are pretty much the same as sunsets with the key difference being that sunsets occur at totally reasonable times of the day.

Being a strong believer that no one should ever see more than one 5 o'clock in any one day, I was dragged out of bed, driven to a hill in the cold pitch black and told to climb it. I climbed, I reached the top and then collapsed and fell asleep. When I woke up again, it was daylight and I noticed for the first time we could see Ayres Rock in the distance. I later discovered the whole group had photos of me collapsed on the sand dune with Ayres rock in the distance. I grumpily got up, ignored the Germans and went to eat breakfast.

After a lot of coffee and a nap on the bus we reached the Olgas - bit about them - called Kata Tjuta in aboriginal (bit about them too...prefer to be called Nguru). The Olgas basically consist of 36 massive domes which look like they are made of big, round boulders plastered together by Mud (actually sandstone). They are huge, up to 1066 metres and walking through them feels a bit like walking through the set from some Martian film.

After walking around for a few hours we made our way to what we had come to see - Ayres rock - where Rat declared for at least the 20th time that day that we would get out for a quick ´short walk´. This led to a wander to a couple of the traditionally used areas of the rock. This has always had a high degree of sprirtual importance for the Aboriginals and over the years various nooks and crannies in this massive free standing boulder have been used for ceremonies, shelter and teaching. As such we were led into one of the traditional classrooms where we were given a brief, but not that brief, history of the rock along with some of the accomanying lore, known as dreamtime by the Nguru. While some of this is shared, most of it we were told, was not known outside of Aboriginal circles as they guarded their traditional stories and legends fiercley, only someone who has proven themselves can be told the legends and this doesn´t happen with westerners very much. Only the eldest elders know the complete stories.

Following this, we retreated to a viewing area for, guess what, sunset. Getting there, we walked past hoardes of people sipping champagne and eating canapes next to their luxury buses. Our grubby, unshowered group trudged past clutching a can of warm beer each and watched the sunset before eating our dinner while sat on our rolled up swag bags in the middle of the car park...classy lot.

After dinner it was to a proper campsite this time but still no tents in sight though. I was unsucessfully taught how to play a didgeridoo and not even nearly soon enough, we collapsed in our swags to fall asleep...

...only to be woken in the pitch black, again, to go and see another sunrise. Others seemed to think seeing the sunrise over Ayres Rock, might be worth the second 4am start. To dissuade, I pulled out my camera, got up the photos from sunset the day before, showed them to the group in reverse order...

If I was hoping that this would negate the need to wake up properly I was wrong as Rat came bounding past ushering us onto the minivan for the second worst morning in two days. So I lost, we saw another sunrise which looked remarkably like the sunset from the previous day (just to point out, it was very beautiful, I´m just grumpy(er) when tired). This was followed by a walk around the entire perimeter of the rock itself which really is an amazing site, well worth the visit and bolstered by the great links to the dreamtime stories provided the day before by Rat.

After three longs days, one shower and not much sleep we got back to Alice Springs where we showered the red dust out of our hair and skin, had a sleep in a real bed and then went out with our group from the tour for a great night.

Alice Springs had turned out to be a great accidental stop off, not somewhere which had ranked at the top of our things to do list for this year but now certainly up there in the top 5 so far - not only a fantastic sight but somewhere saturated in lore and history, a really interesting place as long as you have someone who knows what they are talking about with you!

We bought a painting from a local lady selling her art in the street and left on the next 4 hour flight to Perth for Christmas.