Virgin Airlines flight 1681 departed Melbourne at 12:50 p.m. on September 15th and arrived at Uluru at 3:40 p.m. We picked up our rental car and drove the short distance to our hotel, Sails in the Desert. Cindy had stayed there before on her Australia visit with her cousin in 2017 and really enjoyed her visit to this isolated place in Central Australia in the Australian Outback. I had not been there when I visited in 2003, remaining only on the East Coast. We would be there for only two nights, driving around Ayers Rock the next day and then going to a Sunset and Light Show that night and then flying to Cairns the next day. What a difference from Melbourne about as un-urban as you could get. I will complain here just this once and then let it go. Everything was very expensive – the flight, the hotel, the car, the food and the Sunset package. We would probably not include Uluru again, but it was an important memory for Cindy and I am glad I saw it, but just too expensive and maybe even if it would have been even more expensive, we should have stayed at least another day and explored more of the countryside.

Ayers Rock/Uluru is a 500 million year old sandstone monolith standing 1142 feet high and is one of the world’s largest monoliths. It is sacred to the Anangu aboriginal people in the area and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It has many springs, caves and ancient paintings. Before the COVID pandemic about 400,000 people visited the site each. The number has dropped significantly since then but is rebounding. It is a semi-arid climate with occasional frost and highs that can reach well into the 90’s Fahrenheit with little humidity. During our visit, the days were comfortably in the low 70’s and at night it cooled into the low 50’s. We had 1 minute of rainfall!

Despite there being much more grass and more trees than I expected, birdlife was much scarcer than expected and I missed one species that I wanted as much as any on the trip and was supposed to be readily found in the area. This is a Spinifex Pigeon – a gorgeous pigeon with a very prominent crest. I picked up a lifer Yellow Throated Miner at our hotel as soon as I arrived and the following day added 6 more lifers with photos of all and another life photo as Cindy and I drove around the rock and “hiked” some short trails.

So all in all I was pleased with the birding at Uluru – especially since it was not our focus, but I really had expected to find that Spinifex Pigeon, definitely a striking bird. The photos below show its similar looking cousin a Crested Pigeon, seen everywhere on our trip including at Uluru – cool, but check out that Spinifex Pigeon not my photo, one from Ebird. Also a few photos of species seen before on the trip but maybe better here.

But as I said, birding was not our focus. Being near Ayers Rock was, and we had a beautiful morning to do so. We only had the one day and were also constrained by needing to return the rental car to the airport by 3:30 pm. It was ridiculously expensive to rent the car for an additional day and since we would be flying out the next morning and had a group event that evening, we would not get much benefit out of the additional time. There was a free shuttle between our hotel and the airport – timed to match the flight schedules, so we had to have the car back in time to catch the shuttle.

Ayers Rock is about a 20 minute drive from Sails in the Desert and to drive the entire way around the rock without stopping is about the same, but it is worth making many stops as there are many features that can only be appreciated up close. There are caves and waterholes that have been in use for centuries. You are no longer allowed to access the caves or climb the rock but there are a number of places to park and get different perspectives of the rock. These photos give a sense of this.

On earlier trips to Australia – me in 2003 and Cindy in 2018 we had each purchased art pieces directly from aboriginal artists. They are together in our foyer. Now we hoped to find another piece that we could acquire together. There were several artists sitting on the grass at a lawn gallery at the Ayers Rock resort but none of their pieces were just right. Original art was also for sale at two galleries there. The art was much more expensive when Cindy and I had bought our pieces but still reasonable. We finally found a piece we liked and bought it. We don’t have a photo of it (shame on us) and it is out being framed right now so I will come back and add it to this blog post later.

Visiting Ayers Rock, like many other places in Australia has many commercial tourism enterprises. Here they are often related to seeing sunrises or sunsets on/at the rock. In other places these opportunities focus on crocodiles, river cruises, kangaroos, koalas or reefs. We had signed up for a sunset viewing – and a field of lights. Big mistake as the sunset was behind us, not shining on the rock or highlighting it from behind. There were lights, a gigantic field of lights that were something akin to fields of flowers, but especially at this natural and sacred spot, it seemed like an intrusion of modern technology. We won’t be going back to Uluru even if we return to Australia someday, but if we do, we will pass on this program.

Time to go – back to the airport on the shuttle and then onto another Qantas flight headed for Cairns (pronounced “cans”) in Northeastern Australia. The flight was almost 4 hours – Australia is a BIG country! We would rent a car at the airport and drive north to Port Douglas and that adventure will be shared in my next blog post.