The Outback - Day One

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We had to get up before sunrise to be picked up at 6am for the start of our adventure into the Australian outback. We saw a beautiful sunrise whilst waiting outside the hotel and then got into our slightly weird looking bus. It had a bus main section and more of a lorry style cab. Our guide was a guy called Steve who has lived in the area for 20 years doing different tourism style things, he told us heaps during the trip so appologies if during these blogs I go off on tangents!
After picking up 15 or so more people we started our long 500km drive to Ayers Rock.

Our first stop, after an hour, was a camel farm. When the first explorers came to the centre of Australia they mostly used horses, but a brighter explorer thought it would be wiser to use camels. This was how people travelled to the area until the railway line so now there are around 1 million wild camels in the area. It's a bit weird because you don't really realise they're a wild Australian animal until you get here. We saw a few at the farm and then after we left we saw a couple of wild ones wandering around. There's something like 350 different plant species in the desert and the camels eat 325 of them, so they're pretty well suited to the area.

The entire time we've been in Australia we've been surprised by how the country looks, until we got to the desert. This is how we pictured Australia - red sand (caused by the iron oxide), big open spaces and long straight roads.

We had a few stops along the way to restock on cold drinks and to keep Steve awake. One of which was at a lookout point from which you can see Mount Connor. It's a tabletop mountain, a little bigger than Uluru and often people mistake it for The Rock. We walked a bit of way up a sand dune to look at a salt lake and then quickly got back into our airconditioned bus.

After picking a few more people up form the airport (who knew you could fly directly to Ayers Rock?) we went to our campsite. It was quite nice with permanent tents with 2 beds. Plus a kitchen / eating area and a couple of barbeques.

We spent the afternoon at the Kata Tjuta National park where there are rock formations known as The Olgas. They are big dome shaped rocks which the Aboriginal people refer to as many heads (Kata Tjuta). It was quite cloudy but the temperature was around 40 degrees. The rangers close the longer walks if the temperature exceeds 36 degrees so we walked around 1km through the gorge and back. It was pretty cool. Up close the Olgas looked like bees nests.

Chris & I are going to make our fortune as bringers of rain. You would think if you're in a desert then it's probably not going to rain. But when we go to deserts it does rain. And so unfortunately it meant that there wasn't really a sunset to see over Uluru. But we did go for a short walk at the base and then to the sunset point anyway, just in case. There were a lot of buses there, some people had fancy champagne things going on, but there really wasn't much colour in the rock as we didn't know where the sun was!

Back at camp we had a good Aussie barbeque with steaks and sausages and then retired to our tents. We ddin't really sleep very well as the temerature didn't get much lower than 26 degrees and with the bit of rain it made it stickier. In our tent it was even hotter than outside, which is where some people chose to sleep but had to come in from the rain.