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.