Wednesday March 31, 2010 (Happy Birthday Tyson!)

We got up at 5:00 am to catch the sunrise tour called Desert Awakenings. It’s a 4 wheel drive guided tour about an hour before sunrise. The bright spot in the top right is actually Venus.

I love this photo especially because you can see the bright colors of the sunrise in the monitors of their cameras. If you are wondering what the funny looking hat is on the guy on the right, it’s a fly net/cover for his entire head. The flies in this area are UNBEARABLE. I mean, they don’t bite but jesus christ they are annoying. 818 is probably the most even keeled mellow person I have met in a long time and he was pretty much like flipping out. They go away at sunset but sure as shit as soon as that sun rose they were swarming us. They love to go straight for your eye sockets, ears and mouth. Really super annoying.

They served us coffee and juice and these yummy english muffin sandwiches that were loaded with bacon, egg and cheese. This insane woman in our group was actually throwing her bacon away because she said there WAS TOO MUCH BACON ON HER SANDWICH? Whaaaat? I almost slapped the sandwich right out of her hand. Anyways, in the midst of me making love to the bacon with my mouth I had set my camera down and wouldn’t you know it… a shooting star went by. I was trying desperately to inform the others that it was happening and I literally could not get the words out fast enough. So I just starting pointing and grunting and luckily they caught the drift of my motioning and saw the tail end of it. It was truly magical, perhaps because I was eating that magical creature called pig at that precise moment. We keep joking wit 818 that he has a direct line with Mother Nature and every time something is not going our way we ask him to please put in a ticket with her and see what can be done about it. The shooting star was pretty awesome, and I want to personally thank her. Thank you Mother Nature. Now can you please make sure that I get a good sunset this evening.

The last of the full moon.

Sunrise!

We headed off to the National Park area where we drove around Uluru. Every mark or corrosion or slice in the rock has a story. This skull killed someone once. Or something like that. I don’t know… these fables all started to run together after a while. Plus I was way too busy trying to shoot.

The crack on the right was a gash to someone’s eyebrow and the gash on the right was the blow that killed them. I don’t know, look it up.

Beware of monkeys flying.

From the inside of a cave.

Watering hole.

Ann Marie and Pete.

JARIN! Here is your FACEDOWN at Ayers Rock!!!! I was already one step ahead of you when you left that comment Ann Marie was covered in the red sand for the rest of the day. What is the process now? Do we upload this photo to their site? Do we tweet it? Figure it out, handle that ok?

Love it!

If you look closely you can see the pink monkey in his reflection, but really the reason I posted this photo is that you can see a fly on his upper lip. Seriously, you have no idea how fucking annoying these are. Thank God they don’t bite!

After the tour we went back to the hotel and chilled out by the pool for a few hours and hung out by the pool, read my book, had a drink or two, snacked on some over priced bar food, and maybe had a little nappy poo. An hour before sunset we hopped on yet another bus to drive around Uluru in it’s entirety one more time and park it to watch the sun set and get that picture perfect shot of Ayers Rock that you see on the postcards. Pete is pretty much over the rock at this point and he is definitely over sitting on buses, but hey, I did not fly across the goddamn world to miss this opportunity so we went out one last time.

The Aboriginals request that you don’t climb Uluru, but these people are clearly assholes and did it anyways. Look at that bitch she can’t even make it down on her legs, she has to scoot her butt down the side of the rock. A lot of people climb this thing every day despite the requests and repeated warnings that it is against their wishes. In fact, a man who we met at the pool the day before said “Oh the Australians don’t care if you climb it at all. It’s the rest of the world that thinks you shouldn’t” (NOT the case at all. What an A-hole)

Here is Ayers Rock in various stages of the sunset. I am fairly certain that I have twice as many photos of the rock than I do of the Sydney Opera House. I will have to count them to be sure.

Totally unrelated: we have been trying to run the sink in the water and see if it goes down the drain the opposite direction, but neither of us actually knows what way it goes down in the Northern Hemisphere. It appears to go down clockwise at times, but then other times it just gets sucked straight down.

As promised our room came with a hot-tub/spa. Yeah. That is it. No, that is not a sink. It is a two person hot-tub. I can assure you that 2 people do not fit comfortably in that hunk of junk and by the time I eased my body into it and my already scorching skin was completely on fire the only thing I could think of was which was the water would drain down the sink. Our spa session lasted about 4 and a half minutes and we still do not know which way the water goes down.

Tomorrow we are off to Cairns, where is it supposed to be scattered thundershowers for the next 6 days.

RICH: tell Chris that we are all starting to speak with a slight Australian accent! I definitely am beginning to THINK the way they speak but am able to catch myself before actually speaking the same way. I am sure by the end of the trip it will be classic Chris… adapting whatever accent of the person around you. Love you guys! Hope Cancun is fun and I am sure Chris is speaking Mexican by now.

Tuesday March 30, 2010

There is not too much to report today… we slept in, ate breakfast and sat around by the pool almost all day. Holy cow! We ARE on vacation! It was a gorgeous sunny day and I have a very good start on my tan. Highlights of the afternoon were watching a bird brutally attack a caterpillar to death and then swallow it whole. I have video of said event but the internet in the middle of nowhere is not that fast and I can’t upload it to YouTube just yet. Maybe in the next city we hit. It was pretty cool…

Before dinner we walked up to a look out point to see the sunset and the moonrise.

For dinner we went to the Outback Pioneer Hotel. Ayers Rock is basically just one big resort and you have access to all of the hotels, shops, restaurants. It’s very small and everything is in walking distance. The actual town is called Yulara and according to one of our tour guides it is the 4th largest town in the Northern Territory.

Dinner was one of those grill your own meat places, which is right up my alley since I don’t actually like to cook it.

My brother and I ordered the kangaroo skewers and Ann Marie and 818 ordered the combo which was kangaroo as well as crocodile kebabs, beef sausage and emu sausage. I made the mistake of not seasoning my kangaroo (I generally like my steak plain with a little salt if I am cooking it myself) and I regret it now. Ann Marie put some olive oil on hers and it was moist and much tastier than mine. Kangaroo actually tastes a lot like venison… and since I undercooked mine and it was not seasoned, it was actually pretty gross. I put mine back on the grill and then of course, it was overcooked. Peter and I are bound and determined to find it while we are here as a steak in a formal restaurant where someone who knows what they are doing can prepare it for us. The winner of the night was the emu sausage… and the bread pudding

From left to right: crocodile skewer, beef sausage, emu sausage and kangaroo skewers.

Early bed time, we have a 5:00 am wake up call to catch the sunrise.

Monday March 29, 2010

We departed Sydney at 9:30 am, landed in Uluru/Ayers Rock at 11:40am.

The flight was about 3 hours and change and we are now in a half hour time zone!? Huh? Sydney was 18 hours ahead of PST and now we are 16.5 hours ahead. So strange. What’s the point of that? Oh, I also forgot to mention that I tried flipping a coin for dinner the other night… head=seafood, tails=steak. Who knew that Australia had 2 headed coins? Queen Elizabeth now takes precedence on the coin toss as “the head.”

We are staying at Sails in the Desert, a hotel within Ayers Rock Resort. There is literally nothing out here except some restaurants, hotels and the actual rock. There is a little mini village with some gift shops, a photo lab, hair salon and a market, but that is pretty much it. We hung out by the pool for a while and ordered a few beers/wine and tried the Asian marinated kangaroo wrap before we had to get ready for the Sounds of Silence champagne/dinner tour to watch the sunset in the desert. (as it turned out the 5 minutes of silence we were promised was interrupted by a very annoying and funny looking Italian woman and her pal. I will try to get a picture of her later in her wig, hairnet and ridiculous outfits. She is quite a site.)

I should sell this to them for their brochure.

I was so fixed on getting this fantastic shot of the didgeridoo player in front of the rock that I …

…completely missed the actual sun setting. Fail.

The cloud formation was amazing.

You can see it changing shape and color over the course of the hour and here it looks like a bird taking a nose dive into the ground.

They corral us down to the eating area…

…where we met some nice people from the UK and newlyweds from Tokyo.

From the bottom left: crocodile caesar salad, pumkpin feta salad, orange couscous salad (which almost made me vomit because it tasted just like those nasty orange jelly rings you had as a kid), overcooked kangaroo, jasmine rice with orange blossom (best part of the meal!), carrots and overcooked lamb. I guess I can’t expect everyone to eat their meat rare like I do. **sigh**

After dinner we had an astronomy expert come in and teach us a few things. Apparently there is no North Star visible in the Southern Hemisphere. Fascinating that there are different things to see. (He made no mention of the Big Dipper or Little Dipper.) Because of the near full moon I was able to capture these shots with no flash just using available light. Granted I had the camera set to the highest possible ISO, but it’s still pretty cool looking. They had a big ass telescope where we actually got to look at Saturn and saw the rings of it. Pretty amazing. Makes ya wanna run out and by a telescope.

And by the end of the evening, I had nothing left to photograph except this lonely little bug. I am not sure why, but I really like this picture.