Cain Manor

While we were stay­ing at the Out­back Pio­neer, I was wor­ried that we’d gone too cheap. The room wasn’t that nice and I was wor­ried that the next night or two would be equally as dis­mal. It took some try­ing, but I even­tu­ally got the num­ber of the tour­ing com­pany we were using (APT), and asked about the qual­ity of the accom­mo­da­tions we were get­ting. Even­tu­ally I was able to talk a nice lady with the name of Jus­tine about our accom­mo­da­tions tonight (it was, accord­ing to the brochure, deluxe tent camp­ing), and she assured me it was the nicest of the places we could stay. I took her at her word, but still — tent camp­ing?
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We were picked up from our hotel at 6:20 (after being told it would be 6:30, so we held every­one up a bit.) We had a long drive ahead of us — 600KM, or 450 miles. It wasn’t too bad since they broke the trip up with some­what fre­quent stops. Our first stop was at a camel farm, where I got to ride a camel. That was OK, but man are they some ugly crea­tures. I think he might have known I ate his cousin the night before. Then back on the bus for a few more photo ops, includ­ing one at a place called Mount Con­ner (also referred to as Fooluru, since it does look some­what like Uluru.) We made one more stop at a place called Maruku Arts and Crafts Coop­er­a­tive, where Jus­tine got a bit of Abo­rig­i­nal art. She was pretty adamant about get­ting some­thing where the artist was really Abo­rig­i­nal (some aren’t), and got most of the pro­ceeds. It was on cloth, so it’s rolled and packed safely in our lug­gage. At 12:30 we even­tu­ally got to the town near Uluru called the Ayers Rock Resort. There was a name for where we were, but I don’t remem­ber. With­out the resort, there isn’t much of a town. This resort had a range of hotels, rang­ing from what seemed to be pretty high end to camp­sites. We stayed at the Out­back Pio­neer, which was a rel­a­tively low end option. It was one of our only options to choose from, but it wasn’t that nice.
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We left Perth mid­morn­ing, arriv­ing in Alice Springs after a three hour flight.    The flight seemed shorter than it should have been, but that may have just been because I was work­ing on my blog while we were in the air.   We landed about 5 PM (oddly enough, 1½ hours ahead of Perth) Alice Springs time and found it to be some­what chilly.  I can’t think of much that has sur­prised me more on this trip than find­ing Alice Springs, in the mid­dle of Aus­tralia, chilly at 5 PM in the after­noon.   Our pickup from the air­port wasn’t there wait­ing for us, which I did not expect.  It seems that once we left Mel­bourne, there have been more errors in the ser­vices pro­vided (no wash­cloths or hand tow­els in our hotel room, for exam­ple), than we have seen before.  I’m going to attribute it to a more lack­adaisi­cal atti­tudes as you get more remote. After about 20 min­utes, a very chatty fel­low shows up to take us to our hotel.  He spent almost the entire time talk­ing about either his fam­ily or him­self — not very engag­ing, but he got us where we were sup­posed to go.
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28 Novem­ber 2010, Perth, West­ern Australia.

We’ve booked a tour to take us to Wave Rock. It’s a long day — leav­ing at 8 AM and return­ing at approx­i­mately 8:30 PM. The Great Ocean Road tour we did was equally as long, so we didn’t think too much of it. We were picked up early — 7:20 AM, and taken to the gen­eral start­ing area for all the tours that Pin­na­cle Tours has. Talk­ing to our bus dri­ver, we found out we’d be on the road for 750KM or 466 Miles today. Yikes!
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