Shoved myself out of bed at 5am, urgh. Surely you shouldn't have to do these kinds of things when you're on holiday?

It was another scorching hot day and we'd been told that the Kings Canyon walk would be a very long one (about 3.5 hours) and it was also be up and down rocks and all sorts, so I decided to opt out. There was a lovely shady creek walk that you could take instead, which only took about an hour but it meant that I could shuffle along, taking my time and I could also take lots of photos. It was very pretty and I'm glad I did it as it was nice to just be able to take my time and not think about getting from A to B!! I think we did see the rest of our group crossing a bridge across the canyon (another couple on the tour opted out too, so I wasn't by myself) but everyone was so high up that we really couldn't see if it was them or not!

After Kings Canyon, we all piled back into the 4wd to go over to Glen Helen where we'd be spending the night. We also lost half our group and Junior, because some people had booked only on a 3-day tour, and the rest of us still had one day to go. It felt strange that we had to lose our cook too, but Max let us in on a little secret....in that we had actually been secretly upgraded to a 'safari in style' tour as there hadn't been enough people on either tour to make up one group, so two groups got put together! If there had been enough people in our group, then we'd have been having to cook for ourselves each evening and morning and wouldn't have had nice beds with linen and pillows! It would have been sleeping outside in 'swags' each evening, or sleeping bags in the little tents!! Swags are kind of large bedrolls that you put sleeping bags in so you can sleep on the ground outside.

Before dinner, we had a little walk around Ormiston Gorge which was absolutely beautiful. We were the only ones there in the evening (apart from some rock wallabies) so it was so peaceful and nice that I really didn't want to leave. The wallabies were really cute too and I think that we saw a pregnant one, or one that had a little joey in her pouch.

So, our camp in Glen Helen wasn't quite as grand as it was before, but we still had fun. I also still didn't want to sleep outside as there were just so many bugs outside that I thought my vegetarian days would have been numbered as I'm sure I would have consumed a few whilst I slept!! Gross! So, I slept inside the little tents, making sure there weren't any spiders lurking in a corner somewhere nor any moths that would try and devour my sleeping bag in the night! We had also discovered a red back spider (rather poisonous one) in the kitchen whilst we were making and eating our dinner. Up until that time (and this was also before it had gotten really dark) I was quite prepared to sleep outside as I thought I should probably experience it this once as I doubted I'd ever be able to do it again! As there are only a couple of lights left on during the night (the ones by the toilets, and the one in our kitchen camp) of course all the bugs flocked to it like there was no tomorrow!!

Luckily, we got another reprieve as we only needed to get up at 6am to get away by 7am - yay! We'd be having a fairly leisurly last day and then we'd be heading back down to Alice Springs for the early evening.