The hostel was part of the Outback Pioneer lodge and after I had settled in a little bit I went to the tour office with the intention of booking some trips. I seemed to go through a clueless moment in the tour office (I blamed the sun) but the woman behind the counter was patient and helpful and went through the available tours.

There seemed to be two main companies who ran trips if you weren’t already on an organised holiday. One was company was called Anangu tours; this company was run by the aborigines who own the Uluru (Ayers rock) – Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) national park. Anangu is, in fact, the collective term for the indigenous people of the area and is pronounced arn-ang-oo. The other company was called Uluru express and as they were cheaper and ran trips more often I went with them. I booked a trip out to the Olgas (Kata Tjuta) to be followed by a sunset viewing of Uluru. I also booked a Ranger guided walk for the next morning around part of Uluru after which I intended to do the base walk.

I had a couple of hours to kill before the afternoon trip so I walked over to the shop on the other side of the resort as I wanted to have a nosy around and I needed to buy Val a birthday card. As I walked through the area of bush in the centre of the resort complex I expected to see snakes and lizards straight away simply because I was in the heart of the outback, silly monstarr! All I saw was a lot of dust and outback plants.

A small minibus pulled into the car park of the Outback Pioneer lodge. I was the only person to get on apart of a pair of young English sisters. The bus went to a few other hotels and picked up a pair of elderly Scottish women and a middle-aged couple. We made the short 5km drive to the entrance of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National park and here we all had to pay sixteen dollars for a three day pass into the park, a quarter of this entrance fee goes directly to the Anangu. We drove on for another forty kilometres into the park en route to the Kata Tjuta. All the way into the park the sight of both Uluru and Kata Tjuta in the distance transfixed me.

The minibus stopped at a viewing platform. The viewing platform gave me a fantastic view over Kata Tjuta, which was spread out before me. Our heavily pierced Canadian minibus driver told us a little about the geology which lead to the creation of Kata Tjuta and also pointed out to us some fresh dingo packs. He assured us that we wouldn’t see any dingos and that they didn’t attack humans. At the time I though to myself “hope there aren’t any babies around!” Terrible joke I know!

We got back into the bus and drove another ten km to the start of one of the walks you can do into and around Kata Tjuta. Different parts of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National park have religious significance to either the men or the women of the Anangu. The whole of Kata Tjuta is a sacred place for the men of the Anangu according to sacred Anangu law. According to local information I read there is no inequality between the men and the women of the Anangu, different places just have different significance to either the men or the women. Unfortunately non-Anangu people are forbidden to know any of the reasons behind the sacred sites, as Anangu law does not allow it.

The walk we went on was called the Walpu Gorge walk. Due to the religious significance of the area tourists had to strictly stick to the designated path that was marked out. Heavy fines were payable if people veered off the track, no joke. The designated path also took into safety considerations. The area was rocky in the extreme. The walk was spectacular, two of the peaks of Kata Tjuta looming over head from each side of you, their sides peppered with erosion marks and places where water had run down. Despite the dry heat of the day, and indeed the season, our bus driver told us that a month ago the rains came and a flowing river passed through the gorge causing an explosion in the frog population of the area. A couple of small pools still remained and there were still a few tadpoles swimming around.

The gorge contained lots of lush plant life some of which, our bus driver pointed out, had significance to the Anangu for food or making spears. He also pointed out the buffalo grass which was evident everywhere throughout the park. The buffalo grass had been brought into the country to feed cattle and was introduced to the park to help prevent soil erosion. It was successful in stopping soil erosion but it became too successful in out competing native plant life and now the buffalo grass is now considered a major threat to the national park. Environmental volunteers and employed backpackers come to the park in the winter to manually weed out the manual grass.

The walk took up deep into the gorge until it becomes too narrow to continue. I really enjoyed the walk and such was my enjoyment that even the legions of flies zooming around didn’t bother me too much. I got chatting to one of the elderly Scottish women on the walk back to the minibus and she thought I was on year out after finishing school, bless her! On the way to Uluru the bus driver stopped as he had spotted a lizard in the middle of the road and didn’t want to run it over. He picked up the docile lizard and brought it into the van to show us. It was a blue-tongued lizard and the driver informed us that they often get run over. The driver safely deposited the lizard into the bush away from the road and we continued on our way to the sunset over Uluru.

We parked in the sunset viewing area at about seven thirty pm and took our places to watch the sun go down. There were lots of people there and some of them were very organised and had little picnics going on with wine and tablecloths, very posh! I got talking to the two English sisters while the sunset slowly started; they were quite sweet and took some photos for me.

The sunset itself was the finest sunset I have ever witnessed. I felt humbled by the experience and my digital camera failed to convey the dramatic colour changes of Uluru that I saw. It was a very peaceful experience and it felt oddly surreal that I was there at all. Despite the fact that Uluru was right in front of me I couldn’t quite believe I was there. But I was and I felt profoundly happy.