Wednesday 23 September 2015

Wildlife upside down 4: the red centre

We now headed away from the coast, about as far away as you can get, into the red centre. We were off to see the big red rock, Ayers rock or as it is now known, Uluru in the local Pintjintjara language.
I'm nor sure we knew what to expect. Basically, you are in the middle of nowhere, The town of Uluru is only really a tourist resort (as far as tourists are concerned anyway) with a few hotels and an airport. Our lodge, Longitude, was a bit out of town but did have uninterrupted views of Uluru from our bedroom.
You are only there to do one thing, go and see the rock. hat we didn't realise was there are two rocks - the noe you know and another group called the Olga's or Kata Tjuta. THese are more of a group, like many heads. You watch the sun come up, walk round the rocks, watch it go down. The colours are amazing and change amazingly fast. The photos hopefully give you a flavour if this. What you can't get is the scale!
This was basically the view from our room - not bad. This was middle of the day, so colour a bit bleached out.

and this is as the sun goes down and brings out the colour.



Of course what you don't see from distance are the indentations and patterns in the rock/.




The other rocks, Kata Tjuta, are totally different. this is a distant view of them at sunset from Uluru.



Close-up and the following day they \re probably more interesting than Uluru itself.






on our last day we had a helicopter fligt over both formations, which gave us a totally different and interesting perspective.











Generally there was very little wildlife around - too many people for too long for much to hang around. There were some birds around though.

These black-faced woodswallows were quite common around the camp.

This pied butcherbird has the most amazingly threatening beak.


Crested pigeons have a beautiful coloured wing-bar as well as a comical crest.


These yellow-throated miners were lurking about in a hotel garden,

as were these white-plumed honeyeaters

both of which didn't always get on.



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