Never say awesome again...

We have now seen something that is truly awesome. Uluru is awe inspiring. The largest monolith on earth and worth travelling half way around the world to see. A strangely magical place, even though I had steeled myself against getting caught up in any mystical stuff and nonsense! There is just something about the rock, its beauty, its setting in the middle of the desert, its colour, its shape, its markings... Never to be forgotten. Up there in my Days to Remember with dog sledding in the Arctic. I feel very lucky to be able to travel like this.

I've still not cracked uploading photos - something to do with Apple v Microsoft I think - but Roger is going to add some to illustrate this and if you can, see my Facebook page where I will put some of the photos I took.

It rained in Japan, it rained in Perth. It rained in South West Australia. It hasn't rained in Alice Springs, but the day before I arrived it rained so hard that the usually bone dry and barren desert blossomed with a dense covering of wild flowers. Mostly white, quite a few yellow, some deep red, a few a violet-blue, purple and pink.

I was looking forward to seeing the arid red centre of Australia. Well the earth everywhere is definitely very red, or perhaps more accurately very orange. But the desert? More lush, fertile, green plain than arid waste!

I should be used to my watery journeys by now but I was surprised to be driving through floods half an hour after arriving in Alice. As he slowed down to splash through the usually non-existent river which had burst its banks and spilled over the road, our shuttle bus driver told us: "This is something very few tourists see." Oh lucky us!

We learned the names of quite a few plants on our trip yesterday thanks to trainee tour guide Roz, whose aunt and uncle were the well-known botanists Mary and Basil Smith. Roz searched out a plant which bore two different coloured flowers for us and an upside down plant which sprouted leaves at the top and flowers at ground level. We saw desert myrtle, the yellow gravilia, wattle, acacia, desert oak and, of course, lots of different types of eucalyptus, or just gum trees as they call them here. There is apparently too much of a sort of grass, the name of which I can't remember, which was planted in the 70s to provide food for cattle and which spread into the desert, and many clumps of spinifex, which can give you a nasty wound if you cut yourself on it, but which has useful resinous roots which provide a local glue.

We saw lots of desert flora, but no fauna except for a dead lizard and a few birds, one which looked like a cross between a pigeon and a plover and which might have been a type of cockatiel. I'm still looking for kangaroos in the wild. Apart from a fleeting glimpse of a few in a field near Perth, and some pretty green parrots, the only wildlife we've seen has been in the zoo.

Yesterday I learned that not all boomerangs are designed to come back.  There's one called the No 7, which is made from the root of the mallow tree, which only goes one way.

Off now to explore Alice Springs and to seek out Kevin...