Day Three - Heading Bush

Yalmarralpana Ochre Quary, where we had our faces painted
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We started our day by heading out to Yalmarralpana Ochre Quarry, a place where Aboriginal people have come for thousands of years to collect the naturally occurring ochre and take it back to their lands to use. A local guide, Will, from Iga Warta took us out and mixed up the minerals and painted our faces in a traditional ritual where each of the colors signify a certain healing aspect. He just took the powder off from the ground and mixed it with water to create the paint. Typically he would not be painting the women's faces, but the women had dots and the men had slashes, relating back to our anatomical features. The first color was white, which represented the spirit of mother earth. Next was red which symbolized the blood of the people/mother earth. A greyish/purple color cleansed our livers/souls and the last color, yellow, represented the start of a new day. It was very informative and I was enthralled that you could just pick up the minerals as they were just lying about naturally all in one small area.

The crew with our faces done up
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After saying goodbye to the fantastic hosts at Iga Warta we headed to Leigh Creek where we made a diversion to visit a man known as Talc Alf. Alf has a rationalization for how the symbols for the english alphabet were formed and he gave us a little lesson. Alf also carves sculptures, interesting man.

After passing through the town of Maree we headed off towards Lake Eyre South, which didn't have any water in it that I could see! On the way we made a stop at a place where they had held an arts festival similar to the Burning Man festival held in the states. Some of the art installations were still remaining, I wish I had the time to go and check all of them out, as some of them seemed to be quite interesting.

talc alf (sorry he can't be rotated)
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We met up with the rival tour group, Groovy Grape, at Coward Springs where we attempted to get into the natural springs there but it was about the size of a hot tub and there were WAY too many people involved for that to work. We stopped off at where we were initally going to camp but we all got freaked out by the HUGE number of flies that swarmed us when we stepped out to check out the views. I was really glad that Linda told me that I had to get a fly head net for this trip, I may look like a freak but at least I don't have flies in my mouth, eyes, nose and ears. So we headed on to William Creek where we set up camp and headed in to check out the infamous bar where you can tack up  a business card or something small identifying yourself for a fee and be immortalized on the wall. I spent some time searching through the thousands of papers to see if I could find any Americans. There were a few, oddly enough one was a Virginia Tech student using a copy of their student ID. Made me think of what had happened recently.