We woke up about 6 and turned the heater on in the van to take the chill off the room. We got up about 6.30, and cooked breakfast on the BBQ in the communal area to save me setting the smoke alarm off again. It was a great BBQ and cooked everything really quickly! We packed up and were on the road just after 7.30.

Not long out of Kings Creek Station we saw a dingo cross the road. A bit further up we saw an emu crossing – just slowly meandering his way across. I was expecting him to move a bit quicker. I wasn’t using the cruise control at this point as I knew there could be animals that haven’t gone to bed yet, so wanted to be extra alert.

We stopped about 90 minutes in for a leg stretch and saw a dingo in the “free camp site” we stopped at. He was just looking at us from about 50 metres away. Eventually he went on his merry way, as did we.

Then we could see Mount Conner off in the distance. Kaoru thought it was Ayers Rock at first – a mistake many people make. We stopped at the lookout to take a few photos, and make use of the long drop. I then saw a dune across the road and climbed up that to have a look and was presented with a salt lake on the other side – which had an island in the middle. I called Kaoru up to have a look with me.

We got back on the road and were making great time. Not much farther up the road we had our first glimpse of Ayers Rock. And not much further up we could see the Olgas. So we were starting to get excited. There was a lot of traffic on the road coming from Ayers Rock. We arrived about 10.30ish.

We drove to the campground, checked in, and then found our camp site – we decided it would be good to do now as we didn’t know what time we would be getting back to camp, and didn’t want to have to try to find it then. We had a bit of time until the 1.00 bush food presentation that Kaoru wanted to attend (and was the driving force behind us leaving Kings Creek so early), so we went to the supermarket area to look around, and bought some marinated steak for dinner – we decided against going to one of the restaurants. We drove round to the car park nearest to where the food presentation was, and made toasted sandwiches in the back of the van, and I had a 15 minute rest which was needed. It was then time to go in.

The demonstration was fantastic. An aboriginal man showed us a number of bush foods and where they are found, and then a lady made some shortbread with wattle seeds – and we got to try some that had been prepared earlier! Then it was off to the Rock, where we did the 10km base walk. It’s supposed to be 3-4 hours – we completed it in about 2.75. We decided that whilst Ayers Rock may be impressive, the base walk was not as good as Kings Canyon – mainly because the view was pretty much the same the whole way round. There were different contours to the rock, but basically that was it. But at least we could tick it off as done.

We had completed it by 4.45, so thought it would be good to drive to the Olgas for sunset. I looked at the fuel tank and estimated range left, and we decided it was a bit risky, so had to go back to the campground to fill up first. We then decided we would give it a miss. We had done lots of driving and didn’t need to add another 120km round trip on just for a sunset. So we went to the campground and had some cheese and biscuits and a beer. We walked up to a lookout for sunset but we were too far away from the rock to see anything too fantastic so went back to camp and cooked dinner.

It was cooling down quickly. We bought the heater outside to keep us warm while we ate, but once finished we got dishes done and then went inside with the heater on, and had a cup of tea and biscuits, while writing our diary. We were easily ready for bed by 8.00, but I had been given an alert about my phone being out of space for photos so I had to make sure everything was uploaded to Dropbox so I could delete it all. Luckily Ayers Rock campground has internet coverage! So I got that all done, and we went to bed.