Uluru

After a really early start, and what seemed like the longest bus ride yet (do you know how far Ayers Rock is from Alice?), we made it to the base of Uluru. After passing through the flattest landscape imaginable, for hours, Uluru stands out amazingly - this is not something that is a disappointment in real life.

From the safety of our bus (and what turned out to be a huge distance), Uluru didn't seem to be all that big. Standing at the bottom, however, revealed a completely different picture.
You can't really tell from this picture, but there are some white 'dots' on the right hand edge of the Rock - these would be people... The local aborigine refer to climbers as 'white ants', as that is exactly what they look like, from the bottom.

When you climb Uluru, you are given the assistance of a metal chain (which you can see the end of in the photo below) for the steepest bit of the climb - but it starts halfway up, so you have to scrabble up to reach it!

At the bottom of the climb, we saw little children coming down the chain, so if they could do it, so could we. This meant that we were all smiles and jokes...

...and half way up, rather less happy and more grimaces!

But seriously, we couldn't believe some of the people that were making the climb (or the descent, old, young, large, small, we passed them all on the way up.

And believe me, it wasn't that easy!

Once you reach the top of Uluru, the plateau carries on as far as the eye can see - so you just follow the white line that has been handily painted on. It wasn't all plain sailing though, with crevices followed by mini-mountains to climb up before we reached the end, marked by this very small concrete post (with a ubiquitous 'compass and destination' metal plate on top).

We did try (and, oh, did we try) to get some more people on here, but they kept falling off...

The view from on top of Uluru itself was incredible - the distances were huge, the emptiness mind-boggling. There were a number of times you just had to stop to look again, it really did feel like you were on top of the world...

The Desert   Uluru   More Rock