The Red Centre - Ayers Rock and The Olgas

Last week Ryan and I hopped on a plane and headed to the Alice Springs area for 6 nights. 

Point "A" on the map is Ayers Rock.

My friend Leanna (who was on my synchro team in Waterloo) lives there with her boyfriend, and I wanted to visit her before she leaves in a few months.  We spent the first 3 days driving in the desert seeing Ayers Rock and King's Canyon, then Leanna took us around Alice Springs for the last few days.

Our flight to Alice was about an hour late, so we arrived around 1pm.  We got groceries and bought a cooler as quickly as we could, and then left town.  Unfortunately the map of Alice that we were using had North pointing down on the map, so my navigator (I won't mention any names) took us the wrong direction out of town.  Luckily there was a sign telling us that Darwin was 1600km away, so we quickly got the hint.  By about 3pm we were finally heading out of Alice Springs in the correct direction - towards Uluru/Ayers Rock.

Despite the speed limit of 130km/h, we still managed to get further delayed by giving a boost to some French girls stranded in an old car at a gas station.  The highlight of the long drive, though, was some graffiti on the back of a road sign that said "hello banana nose".  Seriously, it kept us entertained for days!  As it got dark Ryan took over the driving, and instead of watching out for the usual kangaroos, we really had to watch out for the cows on the road.    460km later we finally arrived at our campsite and set up our tent in the dark under the watchful eyes of dozens of rabbits.

The next morning we slept in until 7am (delightful, considering how early we get up at work), and had a delicious barbeque breakfast of lamb sausages and grilled veggies.  We also made our picnic lunch and got to the national park by 10am.  Ayers Rock is massive, and it of course dominates the landscape in the flat desert.  The morning light was perfect, and we enjoyed a few photo stops as we approached it.  It's obviously much harder to photograph from up close.

We were surprised how lush the landscape was in the area.  In many places along the drive there were actually large trees and shrubs, which didn't seem right.  As it turns out, the harshest Outback is actually near where I work.  Go figure!

After a quick stop at the visitor centre we did the short walk to the watering hole on the edge of Ayers Rock, since to walk around the entire thing would have taken 4.5 hours in the 36 degree heat.  The closer you get to the rock, the more massive it seems and the more you can see that it just goes straight up.  I honestly don't know how people climb it (even though you're not supposed to since it's a sacred site).

The heart-shaped erosion in the side of the rock entertained us for awhile, but none of the crazy pictures of me blowing "heart kisses" turned out very well.

Next we drove a little ways down the road to see The Olgas.

Ryan was surprised that they weren't sandstone like Ayers Rock, so then I learned about clasts, brecchia, and the matrix (not the movie kind).  We took another short walk in between two of the cones through a gorge, which was very hard to photograph but also very cool.  The mounds were going straight up on either side of us, and we were in a lush passageway between them.

We managed to time our walk in between two tour busses, so we had a peaceful moment to do some admiring and bird watching without a crowd.

I'm going to do a separate post later about the critters we saw on the trip, but this was a major highlight so I'm going to add it here.  We saw a Thorny Devil lizard!  It was just hanging out on the road, so of course I pulled over and we chased it off of the road so we could take pictures.  He's super hard to see, which obviously means he's doing his job.  He also wasn't very big either - only about the size of your hand.

We had a bit of spare time that afternoon, so we briefly checked out the facilities that the resort had to offer, including a supermarket, shopping plaza, and camels.  Oh, didn't I mention that Australia has one of the last remaining wild camel populations in the world?  No?  Supposedly the camels here are of such pure lineage that we export them overseas to the Middle East!  Crazy, right?!  Anyways, I got it in my head that I wanted to ride one, but unfortunately all of the camels were out on a long trek so I couldn't.  Instead we got to play with the babies that were left behind!

I think Ryan really misses his dog, because this camel got a whole lotta love from him.  Just as we were leaving, all of the riding camels came back so we got to hang out with them for a bit too.

After playing with the camels, we went back to the campsite to wash up for our Sounds of Silence dinner under the stars.  To be continued!