Ayer's Rock (Uluru)

We left Sydney at 6:00 in the morning and arrived at the Yalara Airport at 12. You walk off the plane onto the tarmac instead of using a walkway. It is a little tiny airport.

We checked into our rooms, this was the first time for the hostel/camp like experience. Jocelyn, Kris, Rachel and Rosemary were in one room with two sets of bunk beds. Joann and I were in another, sharing with an Asian couple that we slept with but saw awake for a total of 25 minutes.

Yulara is a resort and it is the only thing out there except for a tiny local village and the aboriginal people (now called Traditional Owners). I felt the isolation.

Once checked in we took a shuttle over to the resorts shopping centre. We got some food at the market, and booked the tours Kris talked about in her blog. Halfway through the process I thought I had lost my Swiss Army Document kit (shout out to Dave P!) and stopped being able to think of anything. In that case were my paper tickets home, my money, my credit card, license and passport.

I took off for the room hoping I had left it there instead of remembering to put it in my bag. The resort is set up in a circle with a largish center and there is a red dirt path from the shops to the place we were staying.

As I walked on the path I slowly stopped thinking about my problems and started looking around me. The plants were green and gray and there were fuzzy white blooms on some of them. The dirt was incredible red and the space between each of the plants meant that each one stood out on this red background. The sky was that clear hard bright blue that I have seen in Arizona and there wasn't a cloud anywhere. And it was so quiet.

By the time I got through the center I had accepted that if I lost the case I would survive and had already started to think about what to do next. Luckily the case was sitting on my bed, right where I left it.