Uluru

The following day we joined a two-day tour of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and King’s Canyon. When we first boarded our bus we were disappointed to see that our tour group comprised of a retired Italian-Australian couple, a non-English speaking Korean student and a cake-loving Brazilian doctor. We were not expecting much fun. Thankfully it turned out that the Italian-Australian couple, Mario and Lynne, where unintentionally hilarious and kept us well entertained. Lynne was suffering from some mild form of tourettes and barely 15 minutes would pass on the bus without her shouting “DINGO!” or “SPECTACLE!” at the top of her voice. Mario was in control of the volume of his voice but was outspoken in a different way. His comments to us about the Aborigines are probably best not repeated on this blog, but kept us amused over dinner. Our two-day tour was expensive but we felt it was money well spent. On the first day we walked the rim of King’s Canyon, and our guide Siobhan taught us a lot about Aboriginal culture (much to Mario’s derision). We stayed the night at Mt Ebeneezer cattle station, before rejoining the bus for our tour of Uluru. Scotty and Tic where our guides for the second day, and were a comedy double-act that kept us well entertained. Aborigines consider Uluru to be a sacred site and prefer that visitors don’t climb the rock, however climbing is not prohibited, so Gaz took up the opportunity to scale the rock. It was much harder than he’d expected though, and out of the six people that started the climb from our bus only Gaz and the Korean made it to the top. We spent that night in the overpriced Ayer’s Rock resort (Old Pioneer’s hotel), before catching our flight to Cairns the next morning.