We flew direct to Ayers Rock from Cairns and booked ourselves in to a hostel in The Ayers Rock resort. We had already heard that the temperature in Ayers Rock was hovering around 45-50 degrees and were well prepared to be hot and sweaty and uncomfortable for a few days, what we weren't expecting was the number of flies which would be trying to eat us alive everytime we stepped outside. As soon as we stepped off the plane we were being attacked, anyone who knows Ben well will be able to imagine how frustrated and angry he was getting trying to whack all the flies away from him, Lisa found it highly amusing and calmly fanned a brochure in front of her face whilst Ben is hitting himself and managed to give himself a papercut on his face! This is when we decided to make our trip to Ayers Rock a quick one!
We shopped around to find a cheap tour to the rock, the olgas and maybe Kings canyon but realised quickly none of it was cheap and it was going to cost us a small fortune! We decided to hire ourselves a car for the day as this was by far the cheapest (but still pricey) way of seeing Ayers Rock and The Olgas! We headed to Ayers Rock to watch the sunset, we were able to sit in the car which was a godsend as we didnt need to get out of the car to watch the sunset! Well Lisa didn't but ben had to get out to go and take the photos, haha! Before I would let Ben back in the car he had to run around the car park to try and get rid of all the flies before he was allowed back in otherwise we ended up with about 100 flies in the car and spent the next half an hour killing the little b*****s!
The next morning we were up at 4.30am (stupid hour of the day) to watch the sunrise on Ayers Rock, there were tons of people there watching the rock change colour as the sun got higher in the sky! As soon as the sun was up everyone disappeared because the stupid flies were trying to suck on everyones eye juice, get in our ears, up our noses and in our mouths, disgusting! At 8am we went on a guided tour around part of the rock and saw some Aboriginal artwork which looked like chalk drawings by children but apparently had been there for donkeys years! The Rock is very impressive it is huge a lot bigger than we expected and looks spectacular when you look around and it is surounded by desert! The guided tour gave us some interesting information about the rock but we felt the history on the Aborigines was quite vague, people dont seem to know a lot about their history! The tour finished at about 10am and we were sweating since the temperature had reached about 40degrees by now so it was a dash back to the car for the air con. We headed over to The Olgas in the afternoon to do a short walk through the canyon. The Olgas are a group of mountains about 30km from Ayers Rock and just as impressive if not more than Ayers Rock. We sat in the car to have lunch and then decided to try the 35 minute walk through the canyon to see some of the scenery! The temperature was unbearable(48 degrees), we were dripping in sweat after 10 minutes walking and obviously the moisture attracted more and more flies, also Ben had a yellow T Shirt on which seemed to attract them even more (haha) we couldnt even speak to eachother on this walk because we were so uncomfortable and we had never experienced heat like this! We managed to do the 35 minute walk in about 20 minutes and were glad to get back in the car (not before running around the carpark trying to run away from the flies) with the air con! The scenery was amazing but it was very hard to appreciate it when you are that hot and covered in flies! Back to the hostel to cook in a kitchen which must have been about 55 degrees and drink lots of ice water!
We only stayed in Ayers Rock for one day due to the heat, the flies and the cost of everything, we got a flight from Ayers Rock up to Darwin!