Heading Bush – Day 6

On day six, after a quick game of invisible ball in the desert, we started off our day with a stop at the Mount Dare pub. This pub is known for being the most isolated pub in Australia. It was about a three to four hour drive to the nearest store from there. Australians sure do love their pubs, no matter where they happen to be! This pub gets about one to two cars of customers a week.

Oh, and in Australia, Hotel can mean bar as often as it means a  place to stay. The hotel in the picture above is a bar.

The place was full of Gallahs (the rose breasted cockatoos). I had fun harassing them… I mean taking pictures of them.

And I did also get some video of the birds:

Seeing all of these birds in the wild makes me sad to think of them in cages. I don’t think I would ever want to get more birds and keep them caged up. They look so happy and free in the wild. Birds are meant to be free, you know? Imagine if you could fly and you couldn’t use it to full advantage!

Onward again, and we now have left South Australia and reached the Northern Territory!

We did a bit more driving, and then stopped for lunch at a place that we were told would have swimming. However… this was not the kind of swimming I really felt safe doing.

It was a muddy river. Isn’t this where crocs hang out? So maybe they aren’t seen in the desert, I wasn’t getting into any body of water in Australia that I couldn’t see my hand when it was an inch underwater. Sarah D, Sarah R, and Penny were brave enough to take the plunge though. They came out Amazon Women!

After the girls had cleaned themselves up, we were off to the geographical center of Australia.

Check out the sign we saw on our drive there…

Haha, the guy in the picture is obviously drunk, he’s on the wrong side of the car! (giggle… American humor?)

Here we are at Lambeit Center – which is the actual geographical center of Australia according to many calculations and measurements.

And my feet, standing in the center of the country!

Here is the whole view of the center. The flag actually said ‘stolen from Lambeit Center’, so if anyone ever steals the flag, they’ll always remember where from.

And here is Matt showing off his arm strength. I could do that, I just didn’t want to.

Next we made our camp next to a mountain. By now, a few of us were coughing and getting a bit sore throat-y. Of course, we blamed poor Helen for it. If I recall correctly it was about 40% of the group that was feeling ill, including our tour guide. I was lucky enough to be still feeling healthy though. It may have something to do with the fact that I was INSISTENT that I wouldn’t get sick for the THIRD time in a row.

So here is a picture of our camp area for this night:

And another one. We climbed this hill to see the sunset, but unfortunately, we JUST missed it.

We did get the moon rise, and the moon looked awesome from up there:

On the way down from this hill, I managed to fall and scratch (badly) my left thigh. The first of my injuries on this trip! Sarah R saw me fall and she did make me feel better by telling me how gracefully I fell. She said it was almost in slow motion, and luckily I managed to not damage my camera at all.

I got myself patched up and didn’t complain about it. I’m a trooper! Here is a pic of camp that night:

Tonight, for some reason, we decided to create beer-tree art. After every empty beer can was squashed, it was put on this dead tree (Beer-trice). I don’t know what significance the toilet paper has, and frankly, I don’t want to know! This picture was taken the next morning, but I’ll put it here on day six anyway.

Oh, I actually forgot to mention this before. On our first day, we were told by Gus that each night we would christen one tree “Beer-trice” where we would throw our empty beer cans at night, and in the morning we would collect them all to recycle or trash.

Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday, and we head to Uluru!