I'm sitting on the tile deck behind our room, enjoying the late afternoon sun but keeping an eye out for any falling lizards (more on that later). My only visitors have been birds. I love how you can be completely lazy and still experience the wildlife. We're in Wattarka National Park now. It's a bit hotter here, so we're getting up at the crack of dawn (6:15a), wandering around all morning, taking a siesta most of the afternoon, and reappearing in the late afternoon when the light is pretty and it's started cool off. By now, the feeling of being on vacation is strong.

Our last evening at Ayers Rock Resort, we went to dinner at the Angruli Grill. Jon had good meal: sweet potato-coconut soup and lemon chicken scaloppine with pesto potatoes and veggies. I made the mistake of ordering what they are well known for: grilled steak. It was overcooked and tasteless. Fortunately, Jon had so much food, we just shared his main. We're both looking forward to better meals in Western Australia.

Afterwards we went on the Night Sky tour. My favorite parts were when Ian, our astronomer, pointed out the Southern Cross (barely visible), Alpha and Beta Centauri (really bright stars in the sky), Scorpio, and how people find the South pole in the Southern Sky--they have 4 different ways of finding it. Scorpio reminds me of Orion in the Northern sky because it's such a bright, distinctive constellation that once someone points it out, you'll always be able to find it. Because we're in the middle of a vast nothing, the sky is very dark and the Milky Way is really bright. In the South you can always see the Magellanic clouds; they look like two tiny clouds in the sky.

The resort has a big telescope, so we got to look at a globular star cluster which looks like a dense area of stars, Jupiter and 4 of its moons, and a couple other things that weren't nearly as exciting. Since Jon is a great amateur astronomer, we looked at the stars at Wattarka as well, and he pointed out several more areas dense with stars. How fun! I'd recommend the Night Sky tour at Ayers, especially in 10 days when Ian retires. Ian clearly knows stars very well but over the last 15 years of doing this, he's become a little obsessed with explaining in great detail and length why astrology is bad and wrong and we shouldn't believe in it. And then for fun he threw in a long story about the birth of Jesus because some astronomers consider Jupiter the Star of Bethlehem.

The next morning we got up very early and arrived at the sunrise viewing spot for Uluru just after sunrise. It was perfect, really, because we had the whole place to ourselves. Mornings are beautiful in the desert. The light is soft, it's still cool, the flies have yet to wake up, and the birds and other wildlife are still moving around. Jon has wanted to visit Uluru since he was about 8 years old, but I have always thought, "It's just a big red rock." Now that I've seen it, though, I must admit, I am impressed.


It took us about 3 hours to drive to Wattarka National Park. It's a smaller, low-key park. There's no entrance fee. There are exactly two places for dinner and the only grocery store is a large convenience store at the gas station. (If you are gluten-free, definitely stock up on food in Alice Springs or Yulara). We may be in the desert with limited cellphone coverage, but we're hardly roughing it. We have our iPods and a card adapter, so we listen to music and NPR on our drives.

Since we arrived during the heat of the day, we decided to go swimming. Oh my. They do not heat their pools here. It's about 90F, but I'm such a baby about cold water. Jon jumped in, but I inched in, and I do mean inched. This greatly entertained Jon and the boy already in the pool. The boy was 9 or so years old and took on as his personal mission to get me to come all the way into the pool. For the next 15 or 20 minutes he kept cheering me on, telling me to just jump in, telling me that I should want an A for 'Actually Tried' instead of an F for "Failure to get in". He and his family are visiting from New Zealand. He would swim around but then come back every few minutes to see if I had made any progress. (I think he was just bored, but Jon considered him my 'young admirer').

Our room has a lovely little tile deck, just a foot or two off the ground, opening right into the… bush? outback? I'm not sure what it's called here. After our swim we sat outside, reading and organizing photos, until suddenly we saw two large, green blobs drop from the roof onto our deck about 10 feet from where we were sitting. They were two large lizards! I am not ashamed to admit that I immediately leapt on top of the plastic foot stool. The lizards were fighting over something and ran right under our chairs. A moment later, one was clinging to the metal frame of our sliding doors and the other slunk away. It was easy to see why they were fighting: the lizard on the door had a distended neck and a tail sticking out of its mouth. I was both horrified and fascinated to have nature do its nature thing right in front on me. Jon was more organized and ran to get the cameras to take pictures. :)

The rest of the evening was less exciting. We saw the sunset with Kings Canyon in the distance. The stone here is all sandstone that is very red and breaks easily, so there are lots of layers of stone exposed everywhere, and apparently weird domes that formed on top of the canyon. To see the domes requires a hike I can't do right now. Dinner was one of the better meals we've had here: a rocket, cucumber, sun-dried tomato salad, crispy french fries with aioli, and a kangaroo steak, still very pink inside. We were thrilled that they let us share the main since both resorts tend to serve too much food.

Today we got up early again and went on the Kathleen Springs hike. It's an easy, short hike but very worth taking. We must have been the first people there for the day. Very early on we saw a small, brown kangaroo! It was just munching on some grass, not very interested in us. We were able to get within about 10 feet of it before it hopped away. It was so cool! The rest of the path meandered through trees and bushes until we reached a waterhole at the end. This area has good water from the spring that supports a lot of trees and other vegetation, so there were birds everywhere . You didn't need binoculars to see them. You just needed to sit still. We must have heard ten or so different bird calls. My favorite birds are the rainbow bee-eaters. They have very pointed wings and are yellow, blue, and some other color. They are really pretty when they fly. Again we were so lucky that we got to have the waterhole all to ourselves for 15 or so minutes. It was just amazing.

We went on to Kings Canyon. It's also a mecca for the local birds. Right at the entrance to the trail are a bunch of little birds with tall crests, hopping along the ground, pecking at something. They don't seem to mind people much. Jon hiked to the top of the canyon but I stayed behind and sat in the shade, enjoying the eucalyptus and acacia trees. He came back and we walked along the riverbed and admired the rocks and birds. Like Kathleen Springs, this area has a lot of green plant life since it has a reasonable water source. I never imagined that the desert would be such a great place for bird watching.


General travel notes:
We talked with our Night Sky bus driver and he said that busyness at Ayers Rock doesn't depend on the day of the week since it's all tourists and that now is the tail end of the high season. Things have been slower this year because of the state of the world economy. Since the desert is large, and we have our own car, we've felt we had a lot of space.

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