17/6/12 - 8/7/12 Three Week Residency at Undara

The next three weeks were spent at Undara Lava Tubes.
My initial plan was to just spend a week before moving on towards Darwin and The Ghan but I enjoyed my time so much and the management loved having me there that I ended up staying three weeks before regretfully moving on.
I'm not sure how I'm going to organise my blogs for this time as a lot of the days were very similar (but awesome!) and not worth documenting with individual blog entries. So I think I'll just start writing and hopefully the story and blogs will organise themselves.
For those who don't know, Undara is a national park in northern Qld that has all these rock tubes which have been formed by lava flows many years ago.
They run tours of the tubes at various times during the day.
There is also the "Undara Experience" which consists of accommodation, camp sites, pool, bistro, bar and other such things that tourists can come to for an "accessible outback experience".
The deal for me was, I would play at 8pm every night around the campfire as part of their daily night time activity.
In return, I got free accommodation (in a donger - I had never heard of them being called a donger before and giggled a little when someone first mentioned it. I'm staying in what? A donger? Bwahahaha), free breakfast, lunch and dinner and the opportunity to play to audiences of more than 30 most nights and flog my cds. Sweet!
Now I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but my average day consisted of:
* Waking up mid morning to midday
* Having breakfast (choice of cereals, toast and fruit)
* Playing some guitar
* Hanging out at the pool
* Having lunch about mid-afternoon (choice of salads, fruits, bread)
* Catching up with the Undara girls at the pool in the afternoon
* Dinner
* Playing around the campfire
* Meeting and chatting to audience members after the gig
* Sleep
* Repeat for three weeks

Wow, a kangaroo...not like I've seen 100's of those before...

The odd day I took off from pool duties to go for a bush walk...tough life :P

For the first two weeks the weather was superb with beautiful, clear, sunny days making it hard to believe it was the middle of June.
The staff at Undara were all really friendly people to be around and were from all different backgrounds and of all different ages.
I made some good friends in my time there and am very thankful to everyone there who made it such a memorable experience for me.

Pretty proud of myself...not having to sleep in the van for 4 whole weeks!!