Ayers Rock Sunset

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Today we were leaving Melbourne to start our travels!! We caught a taxi to the airport at 5am and enjoyed a coffee and a doughnut whilst waiting to board our plane. We were travelling from Melbourne to Sydney, where we then had to change planes to fly from Sydney to Ayers Rock. Our flight from Melbourne was a little delayed but luckily not by enough to impact the next flight from Sydney. The weather in Sydney was still looking a little miserable when we arrived at the airport but we were glad to see that there was blue skies and sunshine when we arrived at Ayers Rock. There is only 1 resort for accommodation in Ayers Rock, but there are lots of options of hotels/ camping/ motels and hostels within that resort.We were staying in the hostel at Outback Pioneer Lodge, so we caught a shuttle bus across to the resort and checked in to our room.

The resort is built around a huge roundabout, which has an elevated viewing platform for views of Uluru in the centre of the roundabout. We walked to the main shopping area of the resort, passing across the viewing platform to take a few photos on the way. We bought a few supplies from the supermarket and picked up our car which we had hired from Hertz. We managed to get an upgrade from the standard Yarris to a Ford Falcon XR8 as we had a voucher from the Entertainment book.

We took a drive out to Uluru to check out a couple of the walks around the base of the rock. It was a very impressive site as we were driving up to it, much more spectacular than we had expected it to be. We took a drive around the full base of the rock before parking up to take a walk at ?????, we then drove on the main car park at the rock where a couple of the walks start from, including the climb to the top of the rock. Unfortunately the climb was closed due to high winds so we didn’t have the option to climb the rock today but instead we took the Mala walk which led to one of the watering holes at the base of the rock. We also passed by a few caves around the base which were used by the Aborigines for shelter/ cooking or ceremonies.

It was late afternoon by the time we had completed the walk so we decided to drive out to the sunset viewing spot to get a good position to watch the sunset. When we first arrived the sun was shining strongly on the top part of the rock so we got to see a bit of the red glow that the sun generates at sun set, but unfortunately there were a few clouds blocking the sun when it was setting so we didn’t get the full effect. We met one of the rangers at the sunset viewing area who was capturing photos of the sunset for 100 days in a row to make a video which he was planning to upload to YouTube (Google “Uluru sunset 100”). He told us not to give up on the sunset when the clouds came over though as he has seen it clear within a few minutes and that red glow come back to the rock – unfortunately that wasn’t the case this night though so at around 7pm we drove back to the resort.

We walked across to the shopping area for dinner and chose an Italian restaurant. On the walk to the restaurant we walked the wrong way around the roundabout and so walked much further than we really needed to, but it did help to build up an appetite. We managed to flag down the resort shuttle bus on the walk back, so got back to our hostel much quicker! We were pretty tired by the time we got back to the hostel so we decided to watch a DVD in our room, but none of us even stayed awake to watch the end.

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