Hello from Ayers Rock, or to give it its proper, Aboriginal name, Uluru. Flagging a bit now though, because this morning our alarm woke us as planned at 5.30 am so that we could pack up the room, get in the Beast and drive the 5km to Kings Canyon to see it at sunrise and walk the rim of the canyon before the heat of the day made it impossible. Well, to be accurate, the heat doesn’t vary that much – around 30 in the night and 40+ during the day today, but of course it doesn’t feel so hot before the sun rises.
Now, we’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, but I have to say that Kings Canyon (the Aussies call it their own grand canyon) is pretty amazing. Absolutely huge and very, very impressive. There are a number of walks you can do ranging from 1km to 6km around the full canyon rim. As we left the resort, we saw the coaches that had parked up for the night taking tour parties out to the canyon, and feared we would be walking around crocodile-style with lots of other tourists. It seems though that most people choose only to do the 1km or 2km walk, as although there were a number of people on our 6km track, most of the tour group people disappeared when we got there. There were parts where we were walking without any other walkers in sight. Just us and our absolutely essential fly nets.
First comes the steep climb up the rocks to a height of around 350 metres and it’s quite a tough climb, ‘for the fit and active’as the information sheet says.
After that the walk around was reasonably easy, although over sand, gravel and rocks all the way. But the views of the canyon were stunning, as we walked through crevices, over some plateau, up and over walkways and down to ‘the Garden of Eden’ a little green oasis with a water hole about a third of the way round. There were a number of ‘lookouts’ along the way where you could see the depth and scale of the canyon itself from the rim.
The only disappointment, though one we expected, is that the photos of today, more than any other of the trip, do not do it justice. We guessed that would be the case and so Sid took lots of video so we hope that will be a bit more like the real thing.
We finished the walk at around 9 am (they say it should take three and a half hours, but we must have done it in just under three) and headed back to the motel where we had packed up our things and left them in the room. We loaded the Beast, had a swim and chill (not quite the right word here) and headed off for Uluru.
This was a much easier drive than yesterday. On sealed roads all the way (300kms) and traffic much busier (joke, we counted a total of 19 vehicles along the way). Having done the big outback ride yesterday, today’s was less interesting, just miles and miles of red scenery (it’s all red rock and sand here) so we amused ourselves by thinking of songs we knew that had words or titles relevant to this trip – Love on the Rocks, Rock around the Clock, Trains and boats and planes, Sounds of Silence (that will be explained in next post), Hotel California (on a hot desert highway etc etc for those of you who don’t know it) and on and on.
After just three hours of this nonsense, we arrived at The Lost Camel, our hotel in Ayers Rock. There are five hotels of various grades here and of course, the campsite made famous by the ‘Lindy Chamberlain Dingo baby case’ and the subsequent Meryl Streep film, Cry in the Dark.
The hotel is lovely – I chose it because it’s a very different, odd, boutique style hotel (mid range). The pool was very welcome on arrival and after we’d sat around in the 41C sun for just about an hour (with lots of dips in the pool) we went off to the campsite to do our laundry. Sid’s ironing it now in the air con room, while I write this at around 9.30pm around the pool.
Oh, I haven’t mentioned Ayers Rock. I’ll save that for tomorrow.
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