A short drive sees us pull into Yulara, the township/resort about 15km from Uluru. This is the only place you can stay when visiting Uluru. The township has a supermarket, post office, and loads of accomodation -ranging from camping-to fancy apartments! We spotted "the rock" and were impressed with it! First stop was the cultural center. Informative, and talked all about the cultural significance of Uluru. We made the decision, to not climb Uluru. The traditional owners, say-we do not climb on the rock (as it is too sacred), we hope the information we give you will convince you not to climb also. (Only 20% of visitors still climb the rock). We enjoyed watching a couple of aboriginal ladies painting, then marvelled at the massive Uluru. The following day we were organised early for a ranger guided tour of Uluru (8am!!). We really scored with the ranger-Andrew-was one of the mangers of the rangers-but had no staff-so did the guided tour himself. Again we were taught about the local aboriginal people, their culture, and the importance of Uluru. We were totally amazed with Andrews take on the management of the National park-and how amazing the local people are. He was moved to tears telling us how hard it is for the rangers-to live in "white" society during the week-then go home for all there family/cultural commitments on the weekends. Andrew talked about the difficulty of living in two different worlds-and how much his mates struggled. We were shown the cooking caves, the women's sacred site, and the "nursing home" cave, and the significance of each site at Uluru.

The kids loved the camping ground -and spent hours and hours playing tiggy at the park. Even after all the walks-they still had energy for tiggy. We headed into the township for a look at traditional weapons and some dancing. We were entertained by the resorts traditional dance troupe-and they managed to get all 10 of us up to participate (Aden got scared-and didn't go up onstage) -but we all had a great laugh doing traditional dancers-girls were emus and boys were kangaroos! Of course Craig got right into it, and John, Eli and Coen were great kangaroos!

That evening we headed to the "sunset viewing area" totally touristy thing to do-but as we are seasoned sunseters-we had bickies and cheese and drinks and watched the sun set change colours on Uluru.....nice way to finish the day.

Next day took us to Kata Tjuta (was once called the Olgas). Another spectacular rock formation in the middle of no where-or about 50kms from Uluru. We enjoyed the walks through this sacred men's site.