Extended Road Trip

Darwin was going to be our final stop with the rental car, and then we were going to depart Faizah and take the bus to Cairns to see the Barrier Reef. But... Grandma Fran, and a girl from the U.K. a few cities back, convinced us that we HAD to see Uluru/Ayers Rock. You know, that famous rock everyone associates with Australia and puts on postcards. Grandma Fran insisted it was "magic," and told us that if we didn't see Ayers Rock, we didn't see Australia. So OKAY FINE, we decided at the last minute to go see Uluru.

We called the rental car company, changed our drop off location from Darwin to Cairns, bid farewell to Faizah, and drove south. Fortunately, much of the additional road trip is in the no-speed-limit Northern Territory, so it is to be spent CRUISING AT BREAK NECK SPEEDS for thousands of kilometers in an insured rental car.

On the way to Ayers Rock/Uluru, we stopped off at..

• A non-smelly hot springs (I'm told some of them smell)
• A waterfall with a bushwalking trail:
  
• A cave with sparkly crystal formations in them:
• A camel farm:
  
• And a bunch of outback roadhouses with overpriced petrol.

We ended up giving an Aborigine a ride from one of the roadhouses we stopped at. At first I was nervous, but he turned out to be very friendly and not intent at all on slicing our guts open and stealing our vehicle. Turns out he played bass in a country band and worked in a mine, and had been to New York once when he was a teenager. This was our first conversation with an Aborigine.

That summarizes the stops made during the drive from Darwin to Uluru, which took about 2 1/2 days and roughly followed this path:

Next stop, Uluru.