After a cool night at Curtain Springs free camping area we drove for the hour and a bit towards Ayres Rock. First stop was the supermarket and to get some cash out but they did not have enough to give us any! Asked at visitor information where to get gas and got directed to the Shell servo. The Shell is the only one in town and $2.25L. After waiting in line for ages the lady says to me, no good here the campground is the only place in town for gas – ahhhhhhh.

Worked out Ok as they filled our gas and we booked a nice campsite as well so we had a reserved site to return to allowing us to stay out all day and return to our allocated plot when we felt like it.

First up was the climb of Uluru. You are discouraged from climbing but I recently heard a segment on the ABC about the local people here and there are three distinct groups, the first opposes anybody on the rock, the second want to close it and then re-open it as a paid walk (must be culturaly ok if you pay?) and the third that are happy for people to continue to climb it.

I had decided to climb it anyway and Sharon decided to as well. It is very very steep on the first section with the chain. After that it is up and down and follows a painted line across to the highest point on the rock. There is a nice information cairn there showing the bearing and distances to the surrounding landmarks. Several of the pools of water had these weird creatures in them. One loud mouth guy was yelling at everybody who came past “are you biologist”, blow me down but the third person was a French speaking biologist who told us all about the ancient prehistoric animals (forgot the name).

After our strenuous climb we visited the cultural centre and watched some Aboriginal ladies painting and looking at some colourful aboriginal art and some rather colourful prices for some of it. After a bite of lunch we tackled the walk around the base of the rock a 10.5Km stroll. Two or three sections of this walk are really worth visiting but quite a bit of the section around the back is more of the same really. We saw our first aboriginal art on the walls here but most of it is pretty faded with only a few bits standing out really. We finished the base walk just before sunset so we hung around to see it. The main sunset viewing area had 500,000 cars in it when we went back to camp!

Tomorrow we are trekking around the Olga’s and might even take a sunset camel ride if things work out time wise.

Uluru summit cairn and the Olga’s behind us