25 Feb: Sydney (NSW) --> Uluru (NT).
Yep, +Marc and I have now hit our 5th state in the country of Australia. This is in addition to the ACT, which is similar to Washington, D.C.
So we caught our flight to Ayers Rock, aka Uluru (the Aboriginal name), and met up with an organized tour. This is really the only place that I booked one of these for multiple days because of how remote it seemed. We were dropped off at our hotel and grabbed a bite. You are definitely in "the middle of nowhere" here and we were told about opportunities to see camels in addition to the hikes, etc.
Unfortunately the weather lived up to the forecast and we had dark clouds looming everywhere. We did take a walk around Kata Tjuta, which is in the same national park as Uluru. For me, I really thought Kata Tjuta was more interesting to look at. I mean Uluru is also a pretty amazing place considering the landscape around it (read: semi-arid flat land), but it just didn't hit me the same way as Kata Tjuta. We posted pics on FB so have a look.
One thing that was very noticeable was the flies. Fortunately they don't bite you like mozzies, but they swarm you to the point where the walks can be pretty unpleasant. Some folks were smart enough to get "fly nets" for their faces and boy, did we wish we did that! Utterly annoying and distracting. I was jealous and felt like stealing one off of someone like Jerry Seinfeld did in the "Marble Rye" episode.
After the Kata Tjuta walk, the tour then arranged for us to see the sunset over Uluru. The park literally has places where they have areas for people to see the sunrise and the sunset. Unfortunately for us, the clouds won out and we didn't get much of a sunset. We had been very lucky on this trip with respect to weather, but we ran into some bad luck here. Oh well.
After the sunset, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. It was kind of late, especially because we knew we needed to be up at 4:50am to catch the tour to hopefully see a decent sunrise.
So we caught our flight to Ayers Rock, aka Uluru (the Aboriginal name), and met up with an organized tour. This is really the only place that I booked one of these for multiple days because of how remote it seemed. We were dropped off at our hotel and grabbed a bite. You are definitely in "the middle of nowhere" here and we were told about opportunities to see camels in addition to the hikes, etc.Unfortunately the weather lived up to the forecast and we had dark clouds looming everywhere. We did take a walk around Kata Tjuta, which is in the same national park as Uluru. For me, I really thought Kata Tjuta was more interesting to look at. I mean Uluru is also a pretty amazing place considering the landscape around it (read: semi-arid flat land), but it just didn't hit me the same way as Kata Tjuta. We posted pics on FB so have a look.
One thing that was very noticeable was the flies. Fortunately they don't bite you like mozzies, but they swarm you to the point where the walks can be pretty unpleasant. Some folks were smart enough to get "fly nets" for their faces and boy, did we wish we did that! Utterly annoying and distracting. I was jealous and felt like stealing one off of someone like Jerry Seinfeld did in the "Marble Rye" episode.After the Kata Tjuta walk, the tour then arranged for us to see the sunset over Uluru. The park literally has places where they have areas for people to see the sunrise and the sunset. Unfortunately for us, the clouds won out and we didn't get much of a sunset. We had been very lucky on this trip with respect to weather, but we ran into some bad luck here. Oh well.
After the sunset, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. It was kind of late, especially because we knew we needed to be up at 4:50am to catch the tour to hopefully see a decent sunrise.