We arrived in Alice Springs from Darwin to incredible heat, humidity and thousands of flies. Our favourite combination.

We booked into Annie's Place (great fish and chips for GBP 2) for a night, before picking up our Camp n' Drive station wagon for the 1500 kilometre round trip to Uluru (Ayer's Rock), King's Canyon and the Olgas, three famous rock formations in the Red Centre of Australia.

Day one and we drove the 450 kilometres to Ayer's Rock Resort, after stopping off at Jim's Place along the way to hear Dinky the singing dingo perform. Unfortunately we'd missed the show and he was tired after four performances that morning. Rich's new nickname (from Allison) of Dicky T (T standing for tumbleweed) came into use again, as Rich joked with this outback fella about the dingo being a bit of a diva. You could literally hear the wheels turning in his head as he stared gormlessly into space, but to be fair this fella was typical outback / small town Aussie....brainless and the type of fella who looked destined to marry his cousin, eyes close together, knuckles dragging along the floor, the lot! They say Australian animals use the least amount of their brains of any animals due to the heat.....you get my point!

Anyway, we arrived at Ayer's Rock Resort after counting about a hundred dead kangaroos, a camel and other animals, and disappointingly not seeing any live wildlife (except for one camel), though due to the heat most animals are nocturnal.  The drive is pretty uneventful, as you drive along straight roads for hours on end, barely seeing any other cars, so the only thing to look at is arid, red desert and bush (and dead animals of course).

Uluru (as the Aborigines named it) is extremely sacred to the Aborigines, and they have many Creation Time stories on how waterholes and some of the rock formations were created (Creation Time or Dream Time is what they call the beginning of time as they know it).  They also don't like you to climb Uluru, as only the most important of the tribe used to climb it, so they call people who climb it "ants" as that is what they look like from a distance.  Every year on average one person dies climbing it, so they also believe their spirit gets lost there.  When we asked an Aussie bloke in Cairns about climbing it though he said "that's frogs***!"  Who you going to believe the cultural centre or the "that's frogs***!" guy?

After the long drive we decided to take on the Uluru base walk, which was probably a bit stupid at the hottest point of the day (although not too bad today, about mid 30's), but time was a factor.  The walk is about 10 kilometres and takes in some Aboriginal rock art.  Uluru looks very different up close, as from the pictures you expect a smooth, rectangular shaped rock, but in reality there were more grooves, caverns, etc. than we'd thought.  Around the rock there are sacred sites for both men and women, which you're asked not to photograph.

After a sweaty couple of hours we made it to the viewing site for sunset.  The Uluru sunset is pretty special.  As the sun goes down the most dominant colour coming through the Earth's atmosphere is red, hence the red colour you see in the pictures, although our pictures really don't do it justice as it looks much more vivid to the eye.  From start to finish the colours and shadows are constantly changing, until it returns to it's original brown, snadstone colouring, but not before a rainbow effect (only more like a horizontal rainbow) appeared in the sky around it.

We returned to our campsite to camp for the night.  Our Camp n' Drive rental guy had told us that everyone sleeps out in the open without a tent in swags (which are like big, padded sleeping bags), but when we got to the campsite everyone had tents.  Well, except us.  Not too keen on the wildlife in the Red Centre (Funnelweb, Huntsman and Redback Spiders, snakes, basically everything in Australia bites or kills or both), we crashed out in the back of the car instead.  When we returned I said to the guy, "I thought everyone slept in swags, everyone had tents", he replied, "that's cos they're all tourists!".  Cheers mate!

Next morning and the alarm sounded at 4.30am for the Uluru sunrise.  Much of the same though not as impressive as the sunset.  We also decided to climb Uluru, as so many people were doing it (peer pressure), but more importantly not anywhere could we find pictures of the National Park from up there, and we really wanted to see what the views were like. We did think long and hard, as we don't like to disrespect people's beliefs, but decided it was our only chance to see the views. 

The climb takes about an hour and is best just after sunrise, as the sun is not yet upon you.  It was also harder than we'd expected (asthma and vertigo again) and stupidly we didn't take a bag, so we were carrying bottles of water when you needed both hands free to pull yourself up the chain.  About halfway up we turned back, as the views over the arid National Park weren't spectacular, and really you need both hands free.  We didn't fancy our spirits getting lost there!

Next stop, Kata Tjuta (meaning the many heads, referring to the many monoliths) or the Olgas, about 30 kilometres west of Uluru.

The Olgas are a collection of monoliths, the largest Mt Olga being 200 metres higher than Uluru.  We decided to do the 8 kilometre Valley of the Winds walk, but a sign on the way said it would be closing soon due to extreme heat.  Arriving there it looked open, so we attempted it.

The walk itself was not particularly tough, but the heat was defintitely extreme (late 30's), and sure enough it was closed when we made it back from the circuit.  The flies make things worse too, as to stop them flying in our ears, mouth, eyes and nostrils we wrapped clothes around our heads, so the heat is unbearable.  Still we made it, though the views were not as spectacular as we'd expected.

We drove on to our next campsite 500 kilometres away at King's Canyon that afternoon.  When we hired our car we were told to buy food and given a cool box.  Forgetting we were in Australia and they only know how to BBQ, we bought a pizza only to find no facilities except said BBQ.  Also everything else pretty much melted, but luckily the extreme heat killed our appetites anyway!

On our final day we got up at 6am (a lay in) to do the 10 kilometre King's Canyon walk in Watarrka National Park, a walk which takes you around the rim of the canyon walls with great views, and also down into the Garden of Eden, a shaded and green area with waterholes amongst the dry, rocky cliff tops.  Definitely the best of the walks in terms of scenery, and the Garden of Eden is stunning, though would have been better had there not been fat tourists and Japanese fellas in their pants jumping in. 

We were lucky to see a Euro too, which is like a rock kangaroo, when we got lost for five minutes.  After about four hours of walking we completed our final walk, after about 30 kilometres of walks in 35+ degree heat in three days.  Glad that was over, though so glad we did it.

We drove the 400 kilometres back to Alice Springs for the night, before flying to Darwin the next day.  Not much to say about Alice Springs, but too many flies, lots of Aborigines loitering (unthreatingly though), and not much to do but go see Uluru.