Without any time to catch our breath, we started our 2 day tour of Uluru & Central Australia. This time our driver was called Bender, apparently because he had a fender bender with the bus on his 2nd day on the job (reassuring) & not because he was gay! A few of the girls from the last tour, including our Yorkshire stalkers, were on this one as well. The rest of the group we had to meet by doing Bender's version of speed dating, in which you moved around the bus & spent 4 minutes talking to each other.

Our first pit stop was a petrol station in Erldunda. Other than a few emus, there wasn't really much to see here. So we continued on down the road until we reached Kings Canyon. We spent that afternoon doing a 9km hike around the canyon. The first part of the walk was extremely steep & had been nicknamed 'Heart Attack Hill'. Thankfully the rest of the walk wasn't as strenuous & was highly enjoyable, despite the fact we could hear thunder in the distance. Most of the rock & sand around the area contained Iron ore, which obviously is quite a good conductor of electricity, so if the storm had reached us, we may well have been screwed!!

Heading back to camp unscathed from our walk, we had a BBQ lined up for dinner. This consisted of beef steaks, camel sausages & kangaroo steaks covered in 'Bender's special marinade', which sounded extremely suspect, but we were reassured that it was only a garlic based concoction. We had a choice that evening of sleeping in our cabins or kipping out underneath the stars in a swag. So myself, Joel & Sally opted for the swags, whereas Lou stayed in the cabin on the one condition that we all slept outside her door so that nothing could get her in the night!! That evening was a full moon so the sky looked pretty amazing, but I was soon fast asleep. It would have been interesting to have a camera set up to see if anything came to visit us that night, but I'll never know how many spiders I ate!!