Uluru - King's Canyon - day 26

This morning we had to get up even earlier... at 4h30! We left the camp at 5h30 and drove in the dark to Uluru to see the sunrise. It was actually pretty cold and although it was a nice sunrise, we're not sure it was worth getting up that early. After that, we walked all the way around Uluru, which is a 9,6 kilometer walk in the sun... Uluru is impressive by its size (348 meters high) and the fact that there really is nothing around it, but apart from that, it really is just a big rock... The strange thing about Uluru is that it's a very sacred place for the Aboriginals and they don't want people to climb on it (even though you can on some days) and you're not even allowed to take pictures of certain parts of the rock because they're indicated as men's or women's sacred areas... The aboriginals have been around for 30.000 years, but their culture remains a mystery because men are not allowed to know about women's business and viceversa. This also means that as a white person, you cannot know more than what a 6 year old child would in their culture... Anyway, it took us about 2,5 hours to walk around it; we saw a waterhole and some very old rock paintings; we also wondered whether there might actually be something inside the rock... We were dying of heat by the time we finished. We went to the cultural centre, learnt a few more things and then had lunch. We got back on the bus and drove for about 4 hours. On the way we stopped at a viewing point of Mount Conner and then climbed a little hill and found a huge salt lake on the other side. This lake is called Lake Amadeus and dates back to when Australia's centre was covered by water. We also saw a few wild horses (they're called "brambies") crossing the road and some more wedgetailed eagles. We saw the sunset at King's Canyon Resort and then drove to our camp somewhere up on a hill in the middle of nowhere. We made a huge fire with the wood we'd collected on the side of the road, then put some dough on the end of sticks and held it above the fire to make some "stick bread". It was really good! After dinner, we also had some roasted marshmallows and looked at the beautiful starry sky. We slept in a swag again, although we were less reassured to do so because apparently there are lots of dingoes (wild australian dogs) in the area...

Weather: very very hot and sunny