G’Day Mate!

Our next stop in Australia allowed us to utilize the beauty of the Round the World airline ticket. The ticket is fixed price and allows you to fly anywhere that a OneWorld code share flight is available. As a result you can fly into out of the way, small airports that are expensive to reach for no extra cost. This worked out really well as we wanted to go from Cairns (Great Barrier Reef area) to see Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in the Outback

Getting to the Uluru can be difficult as the most economical city to fly into is located about 5 hours away and involves a long desert drive that is only recommended for daylight hours due to lots of wildlife you can hit on the way! With our Round the World ticket, we were able to fly directly into Ayers Rock, a tiny airport with only 2 gates located about 10 minutes from Uluru. This saved us tons of time and driving!

So what is Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park?
In case you aren’t familiar, Uluru is a huge monolith in the middle of the Outback. The surrounding area is completely flat for hundreds of miles so it’s particularly spectacular to see this huge monolith in the middle of the dessert. It looks like it was just dropped into the landscape! The color of the monolith is also quite intriguing, particularly at sunrise and sunset, because the rock is red and seems to glow as the sun rises and sets.

PB&J
There were no extravagant meals here! There is only one small town area (and by small, I mean really, really small) so the food options are quite limited and not known to be very good. So…. our first stop was at the local IGA grocery store to pick up food for the next 4 meals. We enjoyed classics like PB&J, apples, and granola bars. 🙂

Kata Tjunta
Kata Tjunta, also known as “The Olgas,” is the sister monolith of Uluru. While it is lesser known, we had read that it is often more preferred than Uluru (and we now agree!).

It was unusually hot when we visited so we were worried the trail might shut down as it closes at 97 degrees. Thankfully it was *only* 95 degrees so we just made it past the cutoff! Our favorite hike was the Valley of the Winds, which is an 8 km hike that takes you up through the rocks of the Olgas and provides some great views.

We were also surprised and happy to see that there were wildflowers still blooming! It is early spring in Australia so we were treated with beautiful yellow, red, white, and purple flowers throughout the hike. It was great!!

Flies, Flies, and More Flies
The less exciting part about visiting Uluru-Kata Tjuta is that it is notorious for having horrible flies. This isn’t exactly advertised on the tourism website ;), but Ryan discovered it while reading forums about visiting. Thankfully, we read there is a perfect solution – Fly nets that you could buy at IGA! Although these nets look terrible, they were a complete lifesaver. The flies go straight for your eyes and ears so it was quite unpleasant without them. With the nets it was great!

In fact, we paused only a couple of times while hiking to take off our nets for pictures. Once we had the nets off, we took the pictures as fast as we possibly could to get the nets back on ASAP!

Sunset at The Olgas
The Olgas are known for being particularly striking at sunset so we staked out a spot and enjoyed a magnificent view!

PS from Ryan: While waiting for sunset, lots of tourists were standing on this post and jumping off to take pictures. Emily joined in this fun… and this picture makes me laugh 🙂

Here are a few pictures of the rock leading up to sunset

And then here is the rock at sunset – notice the change in color!

Monopoly Pricing 101
The hotels for Uluru-Kata Tjuta were the most maddening of the trip. Our hotel night had the dubious honors of being one of the worst rooms and most expensive rooms all in one!

It’s interesting – one resort company owns all of the properties at the park. It seems that development has been limited and the nearest towns of any real size are hours away so this one company has a complete monopoly on pricing. This results in options that range from Really Poor –> Poor –> Fair –> Average, with average being almost $1000 PER NIGHT!! In fact, the Ritz Carlton in Japan was significantly cheaper than our night in Uluru-Kata Tjuta. 😦

We sprung for the dorm style option that had its own bathroom. Unfortunately these only came in 4 bunk bed rooms… so we could have invited in several friends! Ryan wasn’t too thrilled when he realized that he was too long for the bed but the good news is that the room was decently clean (my priority). They even had a can fly/mosquito killer there for you! Not exactly a value… but hey… limited options gives maximum pricing power!

Uluru
We kicked off our morning bright and early to see sunrise at Uluru. Here are a few shots:

We spent the rest of the morning hiking around the base of the rock and looking at wildflowers. It is not recommended to hike to the top of Uluru for several reasons – It’s an aboriginal sacred ground, you have to hold a chain all the way up the steep face, and the rock becomes dangerous with wind or rain. Today access was fully blocked due to high winds. We were quite content with our base walk!

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After a great morning exporing Uluru, we headed back to the Ayers Rock airport. We were limited to 200 km before a per km surcharge kicked in on the rental car (seemed to be the norm for every car rental here!). We were proud of our utilization… 196 km driven!

We’re now on the way to Sydney!