So crawled out of bed to catch our flight to Uluru this morning. Was very dazed and confused but managed to get on the flight in spite of Qantas throwing the normal obstacles in our way – security, grumpy staff and their usual haphazard approach to scheduling flights. Near time seems to be as close to on time as Qantas ever seems to get and eventually we taxied and took off.

So away we went. I was wedged next to a huge annoying Englishman who insisted that both his armrest and my armrest belonged to him. We did the silent armrest fight before I gave up. He was just too monstrously fat for me to stop the overall sprawl of his bulk over both our seats without me straining a muscle trying to hold him back. So I did the professional glare thing for the rest of the trip. He did not appear overly fussed and in fact snored the last two hours of the trip away.

Okay. So the Northern Territory. It’s HOT. Real HOT. 40 degrees and 0% humidity when we arrived. A scorching hot dry heat. But admittedly more pleasant than Far Northern Queensland which has the same heat plus 90% humidity. I am coping much better in these conditions than I do in the far north. Lu just thinks its hot and started drinking copious amounts of water to ward off heat stroke. Me – well it’s actually starting to grow on me. Not 100% comfortable but it’s not a bad feeling either.

We arrived at our hotel – the very oddly named Lost Camel – which is very new and very trendy looking. The rooms having that hip Darlinghurst design touch to them and the building is finished in very funky post-Meditarrian colours. Staff seem pretty pleasant and to Lu’s great delight they have a large and very blue pool. We changed and grabbed lunch – priced exorbitantly. $11.50 for a glass of Rosemount Chardonnay – the same price as the goddamn whole bottle at a bottle shop. Ridiculous even for tourist markup prices. But we survived and have now found a place that sells cheap sandwiches which will assist with lunch on the remaining days of our trip.

The earlier discovery of a pool meant Lu dashed off after lunch and got into her bathers and proceeded to break in the pool. I sat beside the pool and read the New Yorker and then New Scientist. I like holidays – so much time to catch up on topical reading. Also scenery. Lovely scenery. *cough*

After this piece of de-stressing we did the first of our site seeing activities. An Uluru Base and Sunset Tour. Well what can I say first? You must see Uluru to believe it. Literally. It is awe inspiring. Photographs and film simply do not do it justice. I could babble on about it’s magnificence for several more paragraphs but will save you from that and just say – go and see it. Now. Really. I mean it. It’s awesome and I am not normally one stunned by the beauty of nature (being the man who dislikes leaving the city without a piece of concrete in my luggage to prevent homesickness for urban sprawl). Amazing.

Now the tour left some things to be desired. The tour guide was dreadful – boring, factually limited and somewhat of a racist – hidden well but you could sense he’d prefer it if the National Park management board had no Aboriginal members. This way the total exploitation of the park could be conducted without those finicy traditional owners objecting to them leasing the space on top of the rock to McDonalds for advertising. So that wasn’t much fun. But some nice people on the tour – including a lovely French couple and two funny Welsh girls.

We saw some lovely artwork. Refrained from spending our next mortgage payment on an original Martha Spilszer only just though – I had to drag Lu from the gallery. Also the Cultural Center there is really quite good. Very informative and quite easy to take in. Very impressed and no wonder they have won a mountain of tourism awards. Also if you get there check out the collection of letters from people returning sand and rocks that they took from Uluru. Some returning items whose theft dated back 50 years. Restores my faith in some humans. Finally the sunset portion not so good. Cloud cover descended and blocked sun from shining directly on the rock – very disappointing. I hope the sunrise version works better.

Then back off to hotel for some sandwiches and a cocktail for Lu and good ‘ol bourbon for me. All in all a most pleasant day. Looking forward to visiting Kata Tjuta (aka The Olgas) tomorrow after a nice sleep in and some quality time.