THIRTYSIXTH DAY – FRIDAY 13TH AUGUST
Arose and watched the sunrise over the bush and distant mountains. Its was so *#**#*! cold this morning. We headed off to Hermannsburg Mission at 7.50 and arrived there at 8.45 am and had to hang around until it opened at 9. We had a look at the old cemetery near by where some of the original founders are buried. We were welcomed by a dog which looked very much like a dingo – may have some dingo in her. She followed us around – she had these freaky yellow eyes. She seemed quite friendly but we weren’t game to pat her for fear she might bite our hand off! We went and had a look around the town of Hermannsburg until it was 9 and then went and checked out the mission. We sat and watched a video about Albert Namatjira which was very interesting then had a look around the old remaining buildings. We then had an apple strudel with cream for morning tea – how German. We then travelled back east towards Alice and just outside of Alice we visited the Alice Springs Dessert Park. This took us a bit longer than expected as it was a pretty big place and really interesting. We learnt lots about the dessert animals, birds and plants that we had seen already. We also sat through a very interesting talk by a local indigenous man called Doug who spoke about aboriginal art. There are so many different aboriginal groups or countries as they call them over Australia and they all depict objects in different ways and have different languages. You can tell from where the art comes from by the style in which it is done. The Park was set up well and it took us awhile to get around it – we even missed a bit so we could get going. We had lunch in the van at about 3 pm before travelling east to East MacDonnell Ranges. We looked at Emily Gap – very pretty and also Jessie Gap which was equally at pretty with a creek running through it and big old red gums and lots of budgies chirping and flying around. We then continued to look for a campsite for the night. There were lots of dirt tracks going off the main road and Graeme wanted to explore these further for possible camp spots. So we ventured off road once more and found a nice spot looking at the ranges in the distance. The only drawback is we have those pesky ouchies again – the three corner jack things. This may sound strange but I actually swept the orange dirt to make a fairly safe area where we were going to move around in. We set up camp and sat and watched the sun set. Graeme made a fire in which we cooked our vegies again and he cooked our rump steak on the stove. Later on we cooked some more marshmallows on our quirky wire fork for dessert. Oh! I have to tell about this – earlier on when we were setting up our camp somehow we managed to lock ourselves out of the van. Thankfully Graeme had left his drivers window a little open so he managed to get a stick in and pull up the knob to open the door. It was pretty funny and we spoke of things we might of had to do if we couldn’t get in – like maybe break a window!