The morning started with us loading up the car at 6:30. With a bigger car and bigger boot we could get almost all our stuff, except one holdall tucked away out of sight. We are parking in the Sydney airport park and ride so originally planned to take a couple of suitcases with us to the airport to stick in lockers but Mark convinced Pamela that everything was safe and that we would save time. This was an excellent decision as our 50min trip took over 2hours due to traffic incidents.
Thankfully, when we parked, the shuttle had arrived so we ran and caught it and made the flight to Uluru / Ayers Rock (not comfortably but not a mad dash) - that was a lot of stress that morning. The flight was 3hrs but due to time zones only 1.5hrs elapsed - why use half hour time zones!
We are staying in the Lost Camel hotel which is one of the hotels in the resort. It is not the glamorous one but a central one and the room suited our needs. You have have to book all your tours in advance or strike lucky with cancellations or the odd free space. Today we have one tour booked at 6:20pm so that gave us time to settle in and look around.
We were hungry so had a late lunch in the restaurant and then attended a free didgeridoo workshop and Mark was chosen as one of the lucky victims to have ago. During to practice and team exercises he did very well but once it was a Solo turn - nothing. As the man said, classic overthinking issue instead of relaxing and clearing his mind. He eventually got back on track and all was good in the world.
The evening experience we had booked was called the Field of Light Dinner. First we were picked up at our designated pick up point and driven out to a lookout point that gives you the view of Kata Tjuta (domes) and Uluru (Ayers Rock). We were given a drink (sparkling wine or a soft drink- Mark had lemonade) and canapés - this included a kangaroo slider which was a small piece of kangaroo meat on small toast. Then we watched the sunset. It was amazing.
After this we walked to the main dinner area laid outside in the middle of nowhere, it was very elegant with round tables of 10 seats.
After dinner we walked the field of lights which is an installation of 50,000 solar powered lights that changed colours every 6 seconds created by Bruce Munro who is a Brit - a point for us!
We got back to the room at 10:30 and knew we needed to sleep pronto as we had a 5:20am tour the next day to witness the sunrise. Not easy to sleep at all.
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