Northern Territory: Uluru

Early 8:00am Qantas flight, so up at 5am. Flight was good into Ayers Rock. Half hour time zone change - a bit odd. Picked up a Hertz car. Car hire can be a bit of a rip-off here in Aus. The hire is cheap enough, but you can get some massive accident excesses, in this case about $3500, which costs you $35 per day to insure against. You can buy insurance in the UK, I got some for the Perth car hire in the UK with AIG, that cost me £4 per day. On top of this Hertz put a 100km/day limit 25c/km over that, so Hertz look to be in rip-off mode in Uluru! Be warned.

There is only one resort area here in Yalara, run by the one company, so no competition. The resort comprises about 4 or 5 different hotels offering different levels of quality. We are staying in the Pioneer Outback, which is the lowest. Its still OK, we have a big room, en-suite clean and quiet. The bar and restaurant are great, you buy the meat and they provide the BBQ for you to cook on and give you an all you can eat salad bar and desert. Its really nice and lively, live music, dancing & plenty of people having a good time.

I think we did right by only staying here a short while, there is very little here. We have been to both Uluru and Kata Tjuta which are two huge red rock formations sticking up out of the desert. Uluru is 348m high and Kata is even higher. The aboriginies - the Anagu tribe - now look after the National Park. We learned about their culture and their view of how the area was created. You can climb the rock, although they don't want you to, but it was closed when we were there as it was too windy. The flies are great here, they fall in love with you immediately, particularly your eyes, ears and nose, and flock to kiss you. My jungle strength deet had very little effect, the net hat is the only answer. We watched the sunset on Uluru, it was a very clear day and the colour changes on the red rock as the sun goes down are nice. Being dark and clear out in the bush there was a great display of stars. I am really surprised how little wildlife there is out here. It is not really desert at all, it is savannah with plentiful green plants and trees, thay have around 300mm rain per year. It looks similar to when I have been out in the bush in Africa, execpt there is no wildlife, nothing, just a few birds and flies. Contrast that with Africa which had thousands of deer, elephant, zebra ands also lots of different small mammals and a wide range of insects lizards, apes etc. Perhaps the Anagu have eaten them all.

As regards natural spectacles that I have seen, Uluru falls behind Grand Canyon, Niagara, Kilamanjaro and maybe even Teide.

Prices are steep here, no liquor shop, a bottle of plonk in the hotel bvottle shop is min $30, cf $6 in any other town, gas is $1.88 cf $1.38.ltr. Perhaps that's only to be expected in such a remote place.

We have just seen our first wild life - and in the resort, can you believe it! We saw a koala up a gum tree, but it was rubber and we saw kangaroo, emu and croc, but these were on our dinner plate. We had a self cook BBQ with all of the above. Croc was a bit chewy, I think we overcooked it, but the 'roo was delicious a bit rare and tasty, steak like.

We are sitting in Connellan airport awaiting our flight to Melbourne, where we will be meeting up with some friends we made on the POW in India.