Ayers Rock - Camel riding to sunset

Palya to everybody,

This means ‘Hello’ in the Aborigine language of the Anangu. These are the ones who are the traditional owner of the land around Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (The Olgas). We left Cairns on Thursday the 2^nd of January 2014 very early in the morning. After a 2.5 hour flight we landed at the Ayers Rock Airport at 37 degrees Celsius! Oh yeah, that was really hot. On the courtesy bus transfer to the Ayers Rock Resort (where we are staying at the Outback Pioneer Hotel) we got told that it will get up to 43 degrees Celsius in the afternoon! Due to this heat in summer months we are advised to drink one liter of water per hour per person whilst outdoors! So we did our maths and after checking into our hotel we bought 27 liters of bottled water! And it is quite expensive even in the supermarket at the resort.

Anyway, we decided what to do in the next three days here and got everything booked. We had a look at the Town Center Square and then had a nap before we got picked up at 6pm for our evening activity: Camel Riding to the sunset at Uluru! This is something so different and sounds like much fun we were absolutely looking forward to it. And for this I thank my former colleagues from Bremen for their gift they gave me (see here: My Checklist #4) as this Camel Riding Tour costs exactly as much as they have given me. So I send a big Thank You to the Site Operations Team in Bremen!!!

Getting on a Camel while it is on the ground is fairly easy. We were riding Myrtle, the oldest of the camels on the farm, the grandmother. It’s a bit scary when they get up and do these loud noises. But once you get used to the height and the movement of a camel it is extremely comfortable. We were on the third camel of the first string and got around the camel farm a bit slower than we expected it to be. Our guide told us a lot about camels, the environment, the nature and of course of Uluru and the sister mountain Kata Tjuta. As there was some waterfall a few weeks ago it is now the greenest as it has been in 100 years and not as desert-like as you’d expect it to be.

  

It was a really nice sunset at about 8pm with a great purple sky afterwards.

  
After the one-hour ride we were back to the camel farm, got some alcoholic beverages (YEAH!) and some small snacks. While we ate away the Nachos, the beer bread damper, bushtucker and nuts we watched the pictures on a screen that the photographer took during the ride. We bought the CD with all the pictures as this was really funny, especially at the mounting and getting up of the camels. We read a few more information about camels at the shop and then got driven back to our hotel at 9pm (and it was still about 35 degrees Celsius then). We got ourselves ready for bed and the next day which would start very early again (please not....) as we will observe the sunrise at the Uluru just a few kilometers away from it!

Yours camel-riding-at-sunset-at-Uluru Stefanie