The day we had been waiting for finally arrived. After seeing it from afar and debating the best way to approach Uluru, we finally decided to start the day at 8am by going along on a free walk given by one of the rangers of the park then continue to walk around the base of the rock. This turned out to be both a good and a bad idea.
The Ranger walk was fascinating, he told us that along with Kata Tjuta, the rock had special significance to the indigenous people and that there were many teaching stories that were told at various points there and around the rock to the younger boys and girls of their peoples. Our guide himself had been working with the indigenous people for 3 years and had only just begun to hear some of the stories. Some he could share with us, which he did, and others he could not. He showed us an area of aboriginal art which had been used in the teaching and explained some of the history of the rock up until it's present day function. The walk finally ended, 2 hours later, at a surprise waterhole just by the rock. I found it very interesting to learn something of this place.
However, it did mean that we didn't get to start our hike around the rock until around 10:30 (of course I needed to go to the loo and there was only one there) which means that it was already starting to get a bit hot and would only getting hotter. Still we were determined so armed with our frozen 2 litre water bottle, some sandwiches and snacks, we started on the 12 km (ish) hike around Uluru.
From a distance, it is easy to dismiss Uluru as one big lump of rock in the desert. Of course, in some ways that is exactly what it is, but don't think that it is uniform and uninteresting all around because that would be far from the truth. There are lots of little nooks and crannies, big formations and small, ones that we could photograph and others that we were respectfully asked not to. The first part of the walk was the least interesting, the last bit, when the heat really hit was the most difficult but the whole thing was totally worth it.Not a bad way to spend our last day in the red centre. Tomorrow, we give back our car and board a flight to the polar opposite of the desert, the tropics by the see. Tomorrow we go to Cairns, home of the great barrier reef and where we had heard, there was rain!
