We arrived in Australia at the beginning of October for a four month visit. My companions, my sister and brother-in-law, we were visiting their son and daughter-in-law, who of course is my nephew.

For 6 weeks we stayed in their house in the Blue Mountains, doing the tourist thing around Sydney, and the Blue Mountains. During this time we went to the Paralympics a couple of times saw lots of moving events and English athletes winning medals.

The next six weeks we went backpacking down the East coast along the south coast up the Centre and across back to the top end of the east coast and back down to Sydney. We did all that by McCaffery’s Coach pre-booked here in England and we stayed in Youth Hostels all booked on-line and e-mail.

Before the walk around Uluru

One of the best experiences, of which there were many, was a three day Safari from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock (Uluru) the Olga's and Kings Canyon. The mini bus picked us up at 6-30am outside the Hostel. We were a party of 15 in all Japanese, Canadians, Swedish, Germans all in their 20s & 30s (I ought to say I was 64 my sister 69 and George was 74) and 2 Americans our age who had no idea that the trip was so basic.

We slept in tents on swags (bedroll) and cooked our meals on a campfire.  The sites were all set out with tents rigged and there was a shower block but that was the only civilised bit about it. We travelled down the Stuart Highway and considering it is the main highway to Uluru we saw only 2 other cars.  We had a stop to collect wood for our fires, no wood nothing to eat. We arrived at the site which was 22k from Uluru the nearest a site could be.

Warren our guide/driver advised us we had to have a quick lunch because storms had been forecast for late afternoon and if any of us wanted to climb the rock it had to be done in the heat of the day about half the group did the climb, sometime in the near future this option is going to be withdrawn.
We had decided because of Uluru being sacred to the Aborigines we wouldn’t climb we would do the 10k (6/7 miles) walk round the base. The heat at this point was about 40-45c and it is estimated to take two and a half hours. The only 2 not to do either were the Americans but it was to transpire they would not join in any group thing at all. 

The rock looks as though it is egg shaped and just straight sided BUT it is deceiving you are continually walking round corners hoping that the next will be the last and you can see the car park, but we did it and were first back. That evening after we had cooked and eaten our meal we went back to see the famous sunset over the rock BUT because of the threatened storm it didn’t happen. The storm came during the night and I have never seen lightening like it absolutely fantastic needless to say we didn’t get much sleep.

We were up and ready to go at 4-30am so we could see the sunrise but again it didn’t happen to much cloud again because of the storm. Our next stop was the Olgas which are groups of sort of big boulders in strange formations it takes about 1hour to walk round but it is quite flat and it was in the morning so not to hot. The third day it was Kings Canyon and we had to rise again and be ready to go at 5am so we could do this in the cooler part of the day. A canyon is just what you do expect and we did some really precarious ascents and even more precarious descents and it took us all morning. Then it was the journey back to Alice and another 2 nights there before our next coach ride.

This was an extraordinary  trip and though the 'kids' as we called then pulled a few faces on first seeing us by the time we all said goodbye we were great friends in fact I still e-mail from time to time the youngest girl who was German. The whole of the 6 weeks we backpacked we met so many really nice people all younger than us but got on with them fine. It is great in youth hostels, at night after you have eaten (every hostel have little cubby holes in the kitchen for your food no takes anyone else's food) you sit around swapping stories of where you have been and what you've done that day. If someone has had a particularly good or bad experience anywhere they pass it on. This happens at every stop so it is hard to miss anything if it is possible to fit it in your itinerary.

Submitted by Hazel