What a week! Some of our best friends, Jacob and Rebecca, came to visit from NYC. It was so nice having them here! We spent the week hanging in Sydney and they took a couple of day trips while we worked.
And then we headed to the outback for Easter weekend! Us Aussies have Good Friday AND the Monday after Easter off work... holler. As my dad would say, "when the hell do ya'll work??"
We hopped a plane and flew about 3.5 hours to the "Red Centre" in Northern Territory. This means I've now visited every state in Australia! I wish I could say the same about the USA.
We met up with our tour group for the weekend- a camping excursion with Wayoutback Tours. It was us, our Australian tour guide, Dan...some Chinese siblings and a few German families. Let's just say that Dan was the only other person who spoke English confidently! It was pretty much like a private tour as we were the only ones understanding/asking questions :)
A cute little Easter decoration...
First stop- Uluru! Uluru is a World Heritage-listed site and one of Australia's most iconic natural landmarks. It's a ginormous rock located smack dab in the middle of the country. It is a sacred, spiritual place to the Aboriginal community and is believed to be over 700 million years old. It was absolutely stunning!
The Aboriginal communities don't approve of people climbing the rock, so we walked around the outside for a couple of hours.
What most pictures looked like that day... we forgot our fly nets!
The lady taking our picture made us do this strange pose.
Sunset time. One of the cool things about Uluru is that it appears to change colors almost hourly.
Champagne in a camping mug!
John was very proud of this picture.
We then headed to Kata Tjuta- also known as The Olgas- to do some hiking. Kata Tjuta means "many heads" in the local Aboriginal language. And that's what it looks like! Over 30 boulders right beside each other. Funny story-Aboriginal people don't have a word for any numbers over 3. Anything over 3 is just "many." So it's 1...2...3... Many. Many heads!
As we walked, our guide was great at teaching us about what all the Indigenous people ate, how they found their food, the different roles between men & women, and all of the natural medicines they used from nature. Super interesting!
We ended the day with another outback sunset-
The camping group cooked dinner together every night which was kinda fun. The first night we made kangaroo bolognese, the second night we made stirfry and bush bread over the fire.
We slept outside under the stars that night.. so beautiful and peaceful! The next morning, our guide woke us up by playing the song "Circle of Life" really loud. It was a hilarious and bizarre moment. Here we were... in the middle of Australia.. the nearest town is 300 kilometers away...we slept outside... under millions of stars... and this song is blaring through the speakers. Is this real life?
Day 3- Kings Canyon. This was probably our favorite out of the three hikes. It was breathtaking and so massive!
We slowly learned that a couple of the German teenagers in our group spoke a fair bit of English. Their first question to us was... "What do you think of Donald Trump? You know this is an IQ test... and the US is failing, right?" Haha!
We saw lots of fossils and evidence of the inland sea that was there thousands of years ago-
I bought this beautiful Aboriginal painting in a tiny town we drove through. It's a birds-eye view of a bush medicine plant. Pretty neat!
We got up early the next day and flew back to Sydney. It was such a fun and interesting trip. I have never seen landscape like that before and it was great learning more about Aboriginal culture.
We rounded out Jacob and Rebecca's trip with dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant and drinks at our local pub.
Thanks for visiting, guys!!! We love visitors!! Everyone come! It will be so fun, I promise!!! Seriously though, come visit.
