Yep… another shot of Uluru in the middle of the day. It had been overcast for the past 2 days which made the rock look really dull. Well the clouds are all gone and the rock is back to it’s bright red best.
It’s one of those things that you sort of can’t believe… every time you look at it you want to take another photo because it’s so much larger than life…

We rode the camels from the station at Yulara and did a loop around part of Ayers Rock Resort. We stopped at one of the lookouts on the outskirts of the resort and to watch the sunrise.

Kimmy Patting A Camel

This is a part of Uluru that has been weathered away at the base of the rock. Rocks coming out of the wall look like faces.
The story goes that a rival tribe called the Mulgas cast a spell and sent a devil dog to attack the Mala tribe. Many of the Mala tribe fleed the rock however five men stayed behind to protect the Mala escape. It’s said that these five rocks are those five men and that they stay there to keep watch over the Mala people.

This is another shot of a camel.

Meet Wombat the Camel! Wombat wasn’t terribly enthusiastic to carry us… in fact he let us know how unhappy he was about it before he let us onboard. Personally I don’t blame him… I really wouldn’t like the idea of carrying two people on my back either

I’d have to say that this was one of the highlights of our trip. We were taken by tour bus to the camel station at Ayers Rock Resort where we started with a quick talk about camels.
It turns out they were bought to Australia because horses just couldn’t handle the hot desert conditions. The early settlers bought out Afghan Cameleers and Camels to explore central Australia and for the construction of the Adelaide to Darwin telegraph line. Once the Ghan was build the railroad made the camels redundant. The government of the day decided that camels were now a pest and that they should be put down. The government ordered the cameleers to take their camels into the desert and shoot them. Most of the cameleers thought of the camels as pets in the same way we think of our dogs as pets and refused to put them down. Instead they took them out into the desert and released them. Now instead of having 10,000 camels in Australia they have multiplied and there are over 1 million feral camels!!!

We spent a few hours walking around the base of Uluru. From most of the pictures you see you think it’s just a big rock in the middle of the desert but there’s a lot more to it.
It’s about a 10km trip around the base of the rock and there’s a heap of these holes in the sides. Geologists aren’t sure how they were made but think they are due to erosion – either water seeped out of the rock over time (it used to be an inland sea) and washed out these sections or water flowed around the rock and washed out these sections.
The aborigines have a more interesting story about a ‘marsupial mole’. The mother mole dug a big hole at the top of Uluru and her children dug out the smaller holes.
There’s also five watering holes around the base of Uluru. When it rains water gets held at the top of the rocks and it falls down the sides and fills the watering holes.

Hmm… Wilvis felt like getting a little arty… I took one of the previous Uluru shots and desaturated all of the colours except the reds… I think it looks kinda interesting

The sun is almost down now and the orange is dissappearing from the horizon behind me. This combined with the clouds is bringing out the darker tones in Uluru.