Uluru and Kata Tjuta

Close your eyes and think about Australia. If the first thing that comes to your mind is a huge red rock in the middle of the desert, it is Uluru, the famous Australian symbol.
Uluru and its impressive and less known sisters - the Kata-Tjuta (or The Olgas, in their European name) are remote. More than 2000 km in every direction from any major city, except one: Alice Springs. You probably wouldn't call a city with about 25,000 people major, but Alice has become quite famous due to the fact it is located near (only 500km) a rather large rock.
Alice itself is quite ugly. We slept in the most overcrowded  and overpriced caravan parks we saw in Australia, and were happy to leave it first thing in the morning.
Since we had (only...) 500km to drive, we got to Uluru national park in the early afternoon. We quickly drove close to rock, and only then we could really see how enormous and impressive it is. The Uluru is a single block of hard sandstone rising up from the flat surrounding environment. It looks smooth from the distance, but from a closer look it is wrinkled and grooved like the face of a 100 years old man.

Every angle gives a new and more beautiful view on the red giant. The rain that covered the area in the previous two weeks was replaced by sunny blue skies with Simpsons clouds that made the scenery wonderful.

 We did few short hikes around the rock and returned to the sunset viewing area near the park exit. The red sunset makes the Uluru even more red, and watching it from the viewing area is the main attraction of the visit. All the visitor in the park meet in the parking lot, each armed with a camera and the more sophisticated ones will also add some chairs and a cooling box with beers. Little kids are running from side to side between the scattered tripods, while their parents trying to get their next desktop background on their memory cards.
Everyone can get a good photo of Uluru in the sunset, and Oren was busy doing this obvious task, while Lilya did what she usually does and turned her camera towards the watching crowd, trying to catch the more interesting angle of the scene.

Since Uluru is so far from everywhere, there is a small town, Yulara, that its sole purpose is to accommodate all the tourists. You can surely imagine that Yulara became a tourist trap, and the prices there are ridiculously high.
We were determined not to pay those prices and drove about 40km back on the road east until we reached a free rest zone. We were not the only ones that refused to pay the "Yulara fine" so the place was quite crowded, but still anyone could catch his private place of empty desert and set his tent.
We returned to the national park on the following day and drove to the other side of the park where the massive formation of the Kata-Tjuta dominates over the landscape.
Kata-Tjuta is a group of quite a lot of larger and smaller rocks that sticks out of the plane. The largest of them, Mt. Olga, is higher than the Uluru. Between these rocks there are valleys and passages, and we did two hikes there: The Valley of the Winds and The Weipa Gorge walk.

Oren, who visited there 8 years ago, always remembered that the Kata-Tjuta as being more impressive than the Uluru. However, red rocks need sun and blue skies to be impressive, and in the beginning of this day, it seemed that the sun has had enough of us. When the sun finally missed us and the clouds remembered that they had something to do elsewhere, the huge rocks got colored in red, which along side with the deep blue skies and the occasional green plants looked like a calibration table for RGB screens.

The walk wasn't hard and passed through a high window that framed a beautiful view to the valley, before descending to the valley itself.
Later we also did a short but beautiful walk in Weipa Gorge on the north side of the Kata-Tjuta. Before driving the 500km drive to the border of the Northern Territory and South Australia, where we slept again in another free rest area. On the way it seemed that a huge storm in the north is about to catch us, there were thunders and lots of lightnings all around us, but no rain. Eventually, we managed to escape the storm as we drove south towards the border. The storm turned north and we enjoyed a clear night.