I am currently traveling the 450 km (no idea how that translates to miles yet) from Alice Springs to Uluru. I am on a bus with people who are about to begin a 3 day camping tour of Uluru and Kings Canyon. I am just getting a ride to Yulara, the town at the base of Uluru where I will do my first volunteering session. There are not a lot of ways to get out there and when my initial plan fell through, it took about 8 phone calls to find a company willing to make a stop there and who had a space for me on the right day.
In case you don't know why I am headed to this place called Uluru, let me fill you in. Uluru is the Aboriginal name for what was known for the last hundred years or so as Ayer's Rock.
This is the big red rock in the middle of the outback that after a picture of a kangaroo would probalby be the more commonly used image to represent Australia. I will be doing my first volunteering session out at Uluru. I have been told I need to meet someone named Martin at the post office in Yulara (the teeny tiny town at the base of the rock) at 1:30 on August 12. That is all I know. So this morning I left my suitcase at the hostel for 2 weeks and am going out with just my 2 backpacks. Which reminds me--I left my sleeping bag on the plane yesterday like a jerk. But I talked to the desk about it and turns out that people forget sleeping bags there all the time so they gave me one--which happens to be much newer and packs up smaller than mine anyway--I washed it and it is now mine.
On this bus there are about 20 people. However, they are the most geographically diverse 20 people I have ever shared a bus with. The countries represented included, US (me only) Canada, UK, Scotland, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Holland, and Australia.
I am getting annoyed that I keep meeting people that I like and I have to leave them less than 24 hours later! I exchanged numbers yesterday with a girl from the UK who has the same working holiday visa that I do and is staying in Sydney. She was out in Alice Springs because her 3 month job just ended and so she was doing some traveling before returning to Sydney to look for another short-term job. This girl, Jess, was one of my six roommates last night. All 7 of us were from different countries. We were from the US, England, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Australia, and Poland. And all of us were female and ALL were traveling alone.
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Dude, now I just had a close encounter with an emu.
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