Day 10, Saturday, February 13 2010
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We got up rather early, early enough to not be bothered by the really bad flies which don’t come out before dawn. This allowed us to have our breakfast in peace. Afterwards we cleaned up the camp site, packed the swags onto the trailer and started the drive to Kata Tjuta.
Once at Kata Tjuta we did a very lengthy walk around the hills. Because of the rain that had fallen in the last couple of months, it was fascinating to see the desert so green. Every now and then one could see what the desert should have looked like, yet still it was so lush and green. Kata Tjuta was for me reallyl stunning and I loved the different views one could get from the different look outs. Our guide also told us how the aborigines thought the Kata Tjuta hills had come about. THe dreamtime stories of the aborigines are really fascinating.
Our guide also showed us how one could make the paint from the stones which was how the aborigines painted. The paint comes from the different colored stones around Kata Tjuta and of course other places in Australia. THe stones have minerals in them which have different colors and when crushed one can add a bit of water to create paste which can be used as paint.
After the nice time in the hills, everyone feels sticky, hot and hungry so we drove to the Yulara resort, which is very near Uluru. At the resort there were showers, we had wraps for lunch and we could even enjoy a short swim in the pool.
We then drove off to Uluru, where we did the Mala walk and had our first glimpse of the shear masiveness of the rock. It is actually even more huge, though, as it is scientifically thought that we only see the tip of the rock and that it actually goes down about 6km into the ground. Kata Tjuta and Uluru are thought to be massive earth plates, which were pushed up because of geological events many years ago. So the two sides of Uluru are actually very different in age as the one side is the top, and the other the bottom and were formed once through many layers of sediment and pressure which came from times when the whole desert was one big ocean.
The afternoon was rounded off with us driving to a bus park whice was specifically placed so that one could enjoy the sunset over Uluru. There our guide and a couple of people cooked dinner and stayed for a couple of hours, enjoying the sunset and each others company. The sunset was really just beautiful, yet I would have loved to have seen the sunset over Kata Tjuta too.
We then drove back to the resort, where we enjoyed our last night out in the swags with the Milky Way once again over us. I even counted two shooting stars and fell asleep with a smile on my face.