You can never have too many pictures of red rock...

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Set off at 7am again - pretty cold being the desert but we've had worse - and headed up the Stuart Highway towards Alice.
The road directions here were 'go about 600k then take the first left' - hee hee!
This took us towarsd Uluru (pronounced Ooolooroo) otherwise known as Ayre's Rock.
The scenery here turned more like the red sand with gorgeous blue green and purple scrub that I've seen in pictuers. We got fooled (as I'm assured most people do) by Mount Ebenezer which is a table mountain on the way to Uluru.
We stopped off at the Uluru Resort to look at the Visitor centre - about the aborigine people wholive here, the animals and the way that Uluru was formed - it's the end of a big plate of uniform sandstone which was bent 90 degrees compared to the rest of the pate and has therefore been exposed. I hadn''t realised quite how significant it was that it is one piece of rock (as well as the 5km of rock eblow ground) but I suddenly became aware of how uniform it is compared to other mountains. It's also 380 odd metres tall - taller than the Eiffel tower - rising up from completely flat ground for miles around.
We drove into the National Park ($25 for 3 days) and set up camp at the sunset viewing point - making sure we got a good spot! Got the chairs out and a beer each and settled down for the show. It really was gorgeous - for the 20 minutes before all the light shining on the rock had gone, it changed colour so many times - I was quite proud of my 'panorama in time' which basically means lots of pictures of a red rock ( look forward to that one in the slideshow :o)). I even tried to do a video to show how much it changed but I think that was a little optimistic :o)
We camped that night in the resort campsite because it was after dark and there wasn't anywhere else to park for miles - which meants they could horrendously overpice it of course. We planned to eat out tonight because we were finally feeling the pull of vegetables and couldn't quite cope with another meal of burgers or steak. However the food was also horrendously overpriced - q=we thought there would be a market for a pub grub type place but seeing allthe terribly posh 4x4's they can probably cope without - everyone else stays at the campsite. So, burgers it was - but at least it was a gas bbq. Had a chat with some more people doing half the distance as us in about 8 weeks, but I think it was about today that we had our first person tell us they were impressed how far we'd come in the time rather than telling us we'll never make it - woohoo! Also got told off by some crazy Germans for putting washing up liquid on the bbq while it was still hot - oops. Also tonight the oil light came on - this is the oil that we'd forgot to check the previous 2 mornings - despite Dave's protestations that we didn't need to check it once the light went out, we did, it was low and dave and pete refilled it while I held the chair back (the engine's under the passenger seat) - very proud of ouselves :o) How many Cambridge engineers does it take...

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