This little trip through the middle has to be one of my favourite parts of the year.

The bus ride to Ayers Rock was long, as in my opinion, all of them had been thus far. (Boy am I in for a rude awakening later on!). At anyrate, I arrived one night and 3 or 4 videos later at around 4 pm. I had arranged to meet Stewart Palmer (friend from UK) just outside of the bus stop and my heart skipped a beat when he wasn't there. Stewart and company were under a very tight schedule as they were on a world tour and only in Oz for one month, so I thought they might have had to split or had gone on to Alice Springs. I jumped on the cel and gave him a call, and to my relief he was just around the corner.

Panic over, I hooked up with Stewart and the rest of the lads - Nick Turner, Andy Webb and Kyle Thompson. I knew Stewart and Nick from the Corrugated Expos we had all done in Paris, but I hadn't met Andy or Kyle before - both top lads.

The order for the rest of the day was firstly to hire a car and secondly, well, we're Brits on tour, so yes, get a couple of bevies. With the car booked and ready to be picked up the following day, we made our way to Pioneer Backpackers for a well deserved barbie.

The next day, Saturday, we picked up our Toyota Camry and headed off for Ayers Rock. Ayers Rock is truly magnificent and is well worthy of the honour of being the biggest monolith in the world. From Ayers Rock we went on to see the Olgas, another group of rocks coming out of the ground about 20 kms away. After this stop, we were on our way to Alice Springs.

When we arrived in Alice, we booked into Alice Tourist Apartments, and while it was not the most celubrious of places, it did the job. You've got to take into account that we were now 5 people, so finding accomodation that we could all kip in wasn't that easy.

The following day we headed into the West MacDonnel ranges, encountering a lot of creeks along the way which we forded with the car - I hope there are no Toyota reps reading this. Surprisingly, we made it through all of them without damaging the car. That evening we headed into town and ended up at a bar called Bojangles, which had a band playing that night and probably every night, come to think of it.

An hour into the evening, I see a bit of a comotion over by the bar so I make my way over to see what is happening. What I saw made my eyes nearly pop out of my head. There was a 6' python slithering over the crowd, wrapping it's sinewy body around the customers. I decided I had to have a go as well and it wasn't long before this snake was entwining itself around my neck and waist. There wasn't much that was going to top that event that night so I made my way back to the motel.

Our road trip properly started the next day as we began our journey for Darwin some 1500km away.