Melanie and Gavin's Travels

Ayers Rock/Uluru

Here are some photos from my road trip with Kelly and Trent yesterday and today. We drove out to Ayers Rock, it's about 4 hours along a straight road with flat dry land in every direction. Due to the heat and flies we opted to stay in a hotel and man was I glad. We drove to the Olgas first (see photo of Kelly and Trent) for a view and then up close for a walk. See how many flies were on my pack!!

Then we went to the Cultural Center for Ayers Rock, which is called Uluru by the Aboriginals who own the land and technically the rock i guess. They have many spiritual connections to it and ask for people not to climb it, i was quite happy to oblige. Actually it is closed when it's hotter than 36C. There was an old drawing from 1930 in one of the caves as well. We had come prepared to watch the sunset and brought out a great picnic of cheese, crackers, dip and wine. There weren't any stunning colours last night over THE ROCK, but it was still beautiful and a special memory. Today we drove to Kings Canyon so we were in the car for 7 odd hours, see the next blog for that. Overall we had a great 2 days and I feel i got to see some unique landscape, beautiful old & big rocks and learned more about the Aboriginal culture.

By tomorrow night I will be with Fe in Auckland, New Zealand. For those of you that don't know Gavin and I lived there for one year so it will be awesome to see it again and also visit a few other friends. Gavin is leaving Sydney for Rockhampton, which is north of Brisbane.

Oh and the photo with white on the flat land is a salt field we found along the way.

posted by melaniewilkes @ 7:34 PM