Don't pet the dingos

It is really difficult to appreciate the vast size of Australia, or the huge distances involved. We were chatting to the waitress at dinner the other night; she said that she came from a small town in NSW, about 8 hours from Sydney. If you were eight hours from anywhere in England you’d be in Germany. She said that when she and her boyfriend drove here (Perth) from NSW it took four days. It’s difficult to imagine a journey that long, especially as vast stretches of it there would be nothing at all to keep you awake.

Drove the rental car back to Perth Domestic Airport and took the ten o’clock to Ayers Rock, as the airport is still called. Named after Sir Henry Ayers, a prominent businessman and former premier of South Australia, the rock itself is more than two miles long, over a mile wide and 342m high. A single piece of sandstone, it is reputed to extend 3 miles underground (how do they know?) and is a very big deal to the local indigenous people, the Anangu. The whole area is sacred to them; in 1985 the land was ceded back to the Anangu, and the traditional names reinstated. The land is currently leased back to the Australian government, and jointly managed

Flying out here – a relatively short two-and-a-bit hours – you can see the barrenness of the land. With no cloud to obscure the view you could see that there was absolutely nothing down there but baked ground and scrubby vegetation. The only visual variety was that the ground became redder as you got nearer the centre. While you are waiting for your luggage to come off the belt, you can read a poster warning you to watch out for dingos. Their advice is not to stroke them.

We’re staying at what is really the only place you can stay, given there is no town as such, the Ayers Rock Desert Resort, which is a complex of hotels, restaurants, shops and whatnot. It’s completely self contained, and everything’s very expensive because it has to be brought in from a long way away. Everyone who works here has to live here as well. It’s around 30 degrees now, much cooler than in summer, we’re told, and there’s a surprising amount of actual green, as opposed to scrubby, vegetation here. Flies are a big problem. They’re harmless, just a nuisance, and a lot of people are going about wearing hat-mounted mosquito nets. It looks a bit idiotic, but it may be better than flies up your nose. We’ll see. Tomorrow (Weds) we go to see Uluru, staying until sunset to see the changing colours, followed by a barbie. The following day we’re up very early to see the rock at sunrise, after which we go on to the next bit of the tour, Kings Canyon. That ends up, the following day, at Alice Springs.

Internet access is very difficult to find so this may be my last posting for a few days