Uluru (Ayers Rock)

I forgot just how far it really is between Alice Springs and Uluru. And I confess I’m having REAL troubles calling it Uluru. Having grown up calling it Ayers Rock, and having visited it and climbed as a kid, calling it Ayers Rock the whole time, suddenly calling it something completely different is really difficult. Lexie takes great joy in correcting us (quite firmly) whenever we get it wrong.

So we drove the long drive from Alice Springs and made our way to the Ayers Rock Campground (yeah – like THAT was helping my confusion..) where we had a powered site. Which was right in the middle of the unpowered section - I lived in a permanent state of confusion there!

We got a 3-day pass. Wondering yet again why the NT doesn’t have a parks pass. “You don’t have to pay entry anywhere” was the reason we were given for why they don’t have one. Except for Kakadu. Oh and Uluru. And just those two added up to $100 for 2 adults – a parks pass for WA was $88 for the family for the year!

The rock is incredible. Enormous and majestic and always there. It does something weird to the light and looks quite unreal – rather like it’s been cut out of somewhere else and pasted into this landscape. Wherever you are its there – looming on the horizon. We started with a drive around it, stopped to do a few of the short walks at the base of it and spent a mesmerizing hour or so watching the sunset over it.

We also spent some time at the ‘township’ of Yulara, which is actually one huge resort. They have numerous hotels and apartments in addition to the campgrounds, and a little town square of shops and supermarket. We checked out the visitor’s centre, which rather surprisingly wasn’t as interesting as we expected it to be. We are becoming visitor centre experts and obviously our expectations have been raised! We also checked out the Aboriginal Cultural Centre, which was enormous and out at the rock.

There were a number of artists on display, producing paintings. It all seemed rather ‘convenient’ and a bit false. I must say, the artworks being produced are all sold the second they are completed, so they are on a winner there. I rather liked being able to pick the artworks by their style and being able to recognize which community they came from before turning them over and reading the backs – thanks to our time spent in Alice and Darwin.

There is the opportunity to join an afternoon artwork activity where you can use the aboriginal symbols and dot technique to create an artwork of your own. It was rather expensive, and since we had a cupboard full of art supplies and a resource sheet of symbols, we decided to do our own artworks back at Bertha. It was unexpectedly windy and our campmat is now delightfully decorated in spilt brush splotches, but we all had fun. Isn’t that the main thing??