My Uluru Experience

Background: Ayres Rock was first discovered by a European in 1873 - William Gosse was searching for a route through Central Australia and saw the monolith and named it after a politician from South Australia who was funding his expedition. In 1986 the rock and surrounding land (including the Olgas) were returned to the traditional owners, i.e. the local Aborigines, who in turn leased the land back to Australian National Parks on a 99 year lease. At this point Ayres Rock was renamed Uluru and The Olgas were renamed Kata Tjuta. The new owners now get a lot of the ticket sales revenue and other income derived from the national park. As there are only about 150 of the locals living in the area, they each get about AUS$50,000 to AUS$80,000 each year paid direct into their bank accounts for doing sweet FA. Not a bad life!
Uluru is 348 metres high and covers about 9 square kilometres.

Camels: There are estimated to be about 1 million camels roaming central Australia. Originally brought over from Afghanistan in the 19th century to help explorers as they were better equipped than horses for the terrain. They came over with their handlers (called camelteers), so there is a small local population descending from Afghans. There are so many camels and they are of such a high quality breed, due to the lack of disease and predators, that Australia now export camels to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. Genius! Enterprising aussie exporters are next planning to sell coal to Newcastle and ice to the Eskimos...

Sunset at Uluru was easily the best bit for me. You'll see from the photos here that the change in colour is spectacular. As the sun went down the rock got darker and duller but then suddenly it lit up and glowed bright red as the red light part of the spectrum in the setting sun refracted onto the rock (excuse any inaccuracies in my science here!). The sunset itself was amazing too - the best I've seen for a long while.
In the morning we got up for sunrise but that wasn't as good as sunset. I did the 9k base walk, which was interesting cos you get right up to it and can see a lot more of the formations caused by erosion and the aboriginal cave paintings.

I also visited Kata Tjuta (known as The Olgas before 1986) and we hiked the 7k rim walk around Kings Canyon. Both were great to see as well. Equally impressive but unheard of and basically ignored in terms of tourism is Mt. Conner. At 344m high it is only 4m lower than Uluru but covers 30 square metres so much bigger. Plus it has a flat top (like Table Mountain), and I found it just as cool. But it's on private land so you can't easily get up close.

The camping part of the trip was fun, although 2 nights in 1 degree overnight temperatures was enough! We only had 4 people in our tour so quite peaceful (the tours can accommodate up to 24 people) and meant we got more of a tailored service from our tour guide, Ned.

It was definitely a worthwhile trip I reckon despite me not expecting too much from it before I came to central Australia. (P.s. Alice Springs is pretty quiet and boring, glad I'm not here more than 1 day).

Uluru experience