Alice Springs - Ayers Rock, The Olgas and Kings Canyon

Our last trip for Australia – right into the middle. If we’d thought it was hot before, now we learnt what hot weather really was. Temperatures were consistently in the 40’s and on the first afternoon when we did a short walk, topped out at 46°

I hoped we wouldn’t be disappointed by this trip, it’s a long way from anywhere and an effort to get to. We joined a 3 day tour with the 22 people on it and had 2 nights camping. The Olgas did disappoint, but I think this was due to the fact that the main walk had been closed due to the extreme heat, leaving us with a less than impressive walk through a gorge to nowhere.

Sunset at Ayers Rock was an experience, you think there’ll be a few people there – if we were to estimate at 2,000 we probably wouldn’t be far wrong, not exactly exclusive! We did a sunrise walk around the rock the next day starting at about 5.50am, it was definitely worth it.

Our other destination on the trip was Kings Canyon which was also pretty impressive. One thing that we hadn’t expected was the flies – absolutely dreadful, as you’ll see we acquired pretty quickly some very attractive fly nets which managed to spoil a number of the photos – this was definitely better than the flies in the eyes/ears which was the alternative!

The camping didn’t go too badly, we actually slept outside in traditional Aussie Swags, which are like canvas bags you put your sleeping bag on/in. On the second night we even had a wild dingo wandering round the camp – just closed my eyes and didn’t think about that too much! Still don’t think I’m cut out for camping!