10th February 2010
We were woken by Paul at 4:30am while the stars were still high in the sky, now accompanied by a thin, yellow curve of moon. We were awake so early to be up and away to watch sunrise at Kata-Tjuta.
The flies were very much in attendance and pleased to see us as we watched the sun rise over Uluru in the distance and cast its lengthening rays over the red rocks of Kata-Tjuta gradually changing colour. Even so, this is a beautiful time of the day before the heat really gets going.
After watching the sunrise it was off to Kata-Tjuta for an 8km hike through the Valley of the Winds. We started off fairly early with a cool breeze and were able to admire the spectacular orbs of this rock formation, another sacred Aboriginal site - perhaps more so than Uluru and used by the local indiginous people for secret men’s business. I found it a lot more interesting than Uluru, with more variety in the views. We reached the second lookout and were rewarded with a fabulous view right over the plains, which are currently quite verdant.
The second part of the walk back around the rocks to the car park was quite hard going. By this time (although still only about 10 o’clock) the sun was high in the sky and pounding down. There was very little shade about and I kept getting flies on the inside of my fly net! Also, although there were water stops on the walk these were in tanks containing chlorine and so you felt like you were drinking swimming pool water. However, after yesterdays headache I kept drinking it because dehydration is not an option out here. During this season this path is actually closed after 11am because the temperatures soar making it dangerous to walk through the rocks.
Back into the air-conditioning of the bus we headed back to the Ayres Rock Resort for a spot of lunch and a very welcome dip in the pool to cool off. When Paul finally managed to drag us all away from the pool we were back on the bus for our drive to Kings Creek Station again through the quite lush green desert scenary. This trip is very much about a hike in the mornings and a fairly long drive of about 3 hours in the afternoons, this is simply because the distances we need to cover out here are so vast, in fact we think that by the end of the five days we will easily have covered an area the size of Wales.
We arrived at Kings Creek Station, which is another working camel farm and where we will be camping for the night. The campsite tonight is truly remote, a good 20 minute drive into the bush from the entrance to the station, past an airfield and overlooking a rocky escarpment. The stargazing was truly great, especially from the toilet and the shower, just the one of each, neither of which had doors (there was be a great deal of whistling going on) and looked out onto the night sky. Tonight I spotted several shooting stars, along with the Milky Way and also two smaller galaxies, far far away. No light pollution whatsoever. Awesome.
