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Or is it Uluru aka Ayers Rock?  After all, the indigineous people were there first….

So you read the articles and the guidebooks, and you know that it is big.  But no matter how much you prepare yourself, you still cannot believe how big this sandstone is:  9km in circumfrence, 4km at its widest point.  It is like visiting a city and not being able to get into it.  And even after 100 photos, you still find a reason to take another photo or three.

I arrived at Ayers Rock airport at 2:40pm on Sunday, and managed to get on the last regular shuttle bus to the rock at 4pm.  It takes about a half hour to get from the resort to the cultural center, and I had two hours before the sunset tour bus would pick me up at the rock at 6:30pm.  At 4:30pm, it was just starting to cool down, and it was down to 102 degrees.   But the weather is like Arizona - very little humidity meant that it felt much better than the 95 degree day in Melbourne last week.

I spent forty five minutes in the cultural center, which is geared towards explaining the differences between the Aboriginal and European way of looking at things.   There are no shuttle buses within the national park.  In fact, there’s not much of anything within the park.  So I had to walk 2km to the base of the rock along a wide sand trail.  Going slowly and taking pictures, it took about 40 minutes.  I had picked up a liter and a quarter of water at the hotel for the extortionist price of A$7, and picked up a 20oz Powerade at the cultural center’s cafe.  That was enough to keep me going for the two hours.

When I got to the base of the rock, I was at the area where some idiots try to climb it.  It’s 348 meters at a rather steep incline, and two or three idiots kill themselves each year.  The indiginous people (who lease the area back to the government) would prefer that people not die on their property, and I can’t say that I blame them.

I was able to spend a bit more than an hour walking around the NE corner of the formation.   The rock is actually layers of sandstone formed flat 60,000 years ago that have been squished into an accordian shape by various continental shifts.  What we see is the end of the squished sandstone formation sticking up above where the erosion over time has lowered the base land level.  I have tons of photos, but they’ll have to wait until I get to Sydney to be uploaded.

The minibus came by promptly at 6:30pm, and the only displeasurable part of the evening took place:  we had to wait for a sunset that was not going to come.  The evening tour is sold as a drive around Uluru and an hour at a viewing site to see how the colors of the sunset affect the colors of the rock.  But it was very cloudy, and obvious that nothing at all was going to happen.  We still had to sit outside for an hour waiting for it to get dark before they mercifully took us back to our hotels.

I had made reservations at the fancy resort for their buffet dinner.   It was very good, although the service was very slow and disorganized.  For $58 plus drinks, it was a bit of a rip-off, but compared to everything else here it was actually on the reasonable side.

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