Arrival

The flight was for 1030 and fortunately there was public transport on a Sunday morning with enough margin. Anyway I needed to get used to early starts for the tours. Uluru is served by Connellan airport. I used to think one had to transit Alice Springs, but since 2000, Uluru has had its own airport catering for about a dozen flights a day.

The flight was about 3 hours. This meant I was over 2000 km from the eastern seaboard. I didn't have any check-in luggage so I just waited outside by the shuttle bus. The Yulara township provides this service for free for all incoming and departing flights. Of course the cost is factored into accommodation charges since there is nowhere else to stay; even the campgrounds are at Yulara, next to the petrol station, probably the only one around for many kilometres.

I was booked into the Outback Pioneer Lodge which is an affiliate of YHA. There is a hotel section for people with larger budgets. The dorm was quite comfy, nowhere near full, and climate controlled, essential for both summer and winter.

Birds at Yulara included peewees, noisy miners and crested pigeons. The last were quite plump and occupied the scavenger niche that common pigeons do in urban Australia.

Yulara is like a campus with a circular drive but of course no lake in the middle, only a dune. I walked to Imalung Lookout, and had a view of Uluru about 15km away.

Also visible is Kata Tjuta (The Olgas). They fill the frame thanks to the extreme zoom of my camera.

From Imalung, I crossed over to the town square, where there was an incongruous patch of green grass. The native vegetation in this part of Australia is spinifex (Wiki tells me that spinifex is a misnomer) and desert oak (actually a species of casuarina). Although the reds of the landscape matched my expectation, I had not expected so much vegetation in the Red Centre. Perhaps the recent rains had helped.

The town square surrounds a fountain with sail shades. There are a supermarket, post office, gift shop, travel agency, a restaurant, a take-away shop, and a coffee shop, where I had an afternoon cuppa with a toasted sandwich.

A cultural show started at the lawn while I was there. There were also notices for an astronomy talk, by a resident astronomer, a PhD candidate here for the break. As you can imagine, the clear skies make for good stargazing at night. The daytime temperature were mild to me. I was curious what the cold would be like after sundown.

I caught the circular shuttle bus back to the Lodge. This car is an exhibit from an earlier era of tourism, when lodging was at the foot of Uluru, causing environmental degradation, until the area was declared a national park and facilities moved to Yulara.

There is a lookout near the lodge and I joined others waiting for sunset there.

As for that frequent question, is it possible climb it, the answer is yes, with a guide and permit, but not for much longer; there are plans to phase it out. The traditional owners discourage it, partly for reasons of respect and partly out of concern for safety; people do die climbing, especially in summer.

A guide explained it like this: Say you have a lake on your property, which you give tours of, and people swam in the lake against your wishes and drowned, you'd feel bad about it.

If you want to see Uluru from high, you could take a helicopter tour.

I was fortunate to arrive at full moon.

In the evening I went back to the town square to dine. Despite the punny name, the Pad Thai noodles were quite good. I ate them sitting in the outdoor area near the fountain.

The pizza restaurant next door I would save for another night.

The hotel has a swimming pool eerily glowing blue at night. I had brought my swimming trunks in case I fancied a dip after a hot day, but as it turned out, days were comfortably cool.

The hotel also has an outdoor bistro serving bar food, grill your own steak hotplates, and probably their money spinner, drinks. There was live music.

I turned in early because I had to be up by 0500 to catch the sunrise tour.