Uluru

At 4:30 the alarm woke us up, We packed the tent and left for the park. Unlike the sunset spot where you could basically see the rock from the car in the parking lot, here you had to mark and walk a bit to several view points. The closest was to busy, the next once already better and even further there where hardly any people and I’d say it had the best foreground as well.

It was very nice to see the colour change sometimes in minutes sometimes in second. The pictures give an impression, but it was amazing! After the sun was fully up, we went back to the car and had coffee, tea and breakfast, Bacon and eggs again. That seems to work well in this warm weather and then suddenly we had to hurry to be in time for the Mala walk, a guided tour by an aboriginal guide. Leroy did an amazing job, he had a nice style of story telling and would repeat important parts several time.
He talked about stories from the beginning, stories about what foods you can find in the desert, stories about men and women tasks, about skipping generation upbringing (kids with grandparents, parents with great-grandparent etc) and in the mean time he showed several caves and what the where used for. The tour ended at a water well where the water was extremely low, as there has not been any real rain in 2 years. He told about how to clean the water so it could still be consumed if needed, all in all 2 hours flew by.

We stayed around the well a bit as it was nicely cool and then walked back to the car, to drive to the cultural center for a presentation. When we got there it seemed like the movie had just started, so we found a place and saw a very interesting movie about how the land of Uluru was given back to the aboriginal people and all the injustice that had been done before.

We walked around the cultural center had a drink (ginger jalapeno was super nice) and then decided to have lunch at the picnic place. We made sausages and vegetables and had a nice drink with it before we got back to the cultural center. There we found out the actual presentation had been in a different room. While Mo watched another documentary I had a very nice and diverse chat with the ranger that was there. She told me that if we had Leroy as our Mala tour guide, we did not miss a thing. She also recommended to go to the other mountain, Kata Tjuta, 50 km west of Uluru and see the sunset there and have a bit of a walk to the start of the gorge as it is very nice.