round the rock she goes

That evening, after watching the sunset, we headed back to the ayers rock camping ‘resort’ which basically amounts to the luxury of running water, flushing toilets, and showers. it was something almost heavenly to stand under that shower and get rid of that layer of red uluru dust which had formed a new layer of skin.

i had been looking forward to another camp fire all day (i am something of a pyromaniac at heart), and throughout the day this thought mixed together with that other distraction, food, to form the very tasty idea of ‘smores’ (chocolate digestives biccies with toasted marshmallow in between) and i even went out to get the ”ingredients”,only to return and find out the camp site had some kind of fire ban on due to the change in season. it was a bit of an odd experience sitting in a circle on top of our swags and chatting away to what seemed like pitch black darkness. even weirder was the fact i received a text message from my mum in the middle of the night – the rock had reception!

it was an early start again the next morning, 5am, to be able to get out and watch the sunrise over uluru. beer and stir fry were replaced with delicious ‘smoked’ toast (you will understand if you have ever tasted camp fire toast) and coffee. then it was around the rock we went, all 8km of it. dotted along the way were sacred sites to the anangu people, but as we were not yet mature enough to know the significance of the things we saw, we could only geuss which areas or formations they could be, and what stories and importance lay behind them.

compared to kings canyon and kata jtuta, the walk around uluru seemed rather flat and unadventurous – though the gigantic dimension of the rock was certainly impressive, and constantly reminded me where i was!

onxce returned in alice early that evening we all  washed up and met for a final dinner. some great folks on the trip, and i felt really satisfied to have completed all the hiking without too much bother.