Day 122 - Flinders Ranges & Wilpena Pound - Wednesday 15th February 2012

We woke this morning on a double bottom bunk bed with Stefan on a single bed above us. Stefan's English is really good, partly due to the fact he spent 12 weeks on an Australia farm, but this morning he woke with a slight hangover and probably quite a dry mouth as the first thing he said in the morning was "Oh god, I have a drought in my mouth!" Today the plan was to explore The Flinders Ranges and on our way stop at some good photo opportunities. Our first stop was a dried water creek where trees had grown as there was once water flowing through it, probably hundreds of years ago, but now it was just a sandy dust track in the ground and the trees were dead but the amazing thing was that they were still standing and in a perfect row. As the trees were dead they had no leaves, no greenery or life to them and it was so quiet looking at them so it was quite strange and eere! After that we continued our drive whilst stopping briefly to get really close to some kangaroos and joeys. Then we arrived and started our walk, this was only about an hour or so and on route we saw the tree of knowledge and learnt some more about the aboriginals and their creation stories. On the way back from the walk Soph saw a man and a woman walking towards us, now bearing in mind we all hand walking shoes / trainers, jeans, waterproof jackets etc… we didn't expect to see what we saw. As the lady got closer you could see she had a mini skirt on (weird) and as she got even closer, Soph (not me of course) noticed she had a string boob tube / vest on and no bra, so you could see her nipples poking through the string on the vest… you could of hung your rain jacket on them apparently!! After lunch, we made our way to Yourambulla Caves to view Aboriginal rock paintings, it was quite a steep climb up and some of the final steps were by ladder. Once at the top we saw various paintings dating back many years showing aboriginals around camp fires, the white man in the bush and lots of emu and roos. Then we went to an old disused farm called Kanyaka Homestead and learnt about the hardships of farming in Australia and the lack of rain fall in the 1800's one year they recorded 2 inches of rain for the whole year and then none for 9 years! This evening's dinner was Lamb and veg stew followed by quite a few beers for me and red wine for Soph, by the time we had finished the stew and drunk our wine it was already 11pm so 5 of us grabbed some torches and headed into the small local outback town in search of a pub. Once we arrived at the only pub in town, it looked shut, I asked the guy outside if it was open, he replied in his Australia accent "Do you want it to be open?" I thought that's a strange answer, so I said "Erm, yes please!" So he reached in his pocket pulled out some keys and opened up the pub!!! We all had a local Bunderburg rum and coke, then realised that it was gone midnight and we had to be up in 3 hours plus it was a bit weird being the only ones around so we retired back to the dorm to listen to Merle snore!!