Uluru and Kata tjuta

After a couple of lovely nights with Laura in Perth we headed to Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park. Our first evening there consisted of sheltering from a very spectacular lightning storm - pretty impressive!!! Unfortunately the weather didn't get much better than this so we took it in our stride and got up at 4.30 the next morning to see what sunrise looked like - Uluru was covered by dramatic clouds giving it quite an eerie feel. By 6.30 we were beginning our walk around the base of Uluru before joining a ranger guided walk some of the way - he chatted about the Anangu people (the indiginous people) and the laws and traditions surrounding Uluru, was really interesting. From the ranger we discovered that the water which flows off Uluru is sacred to the Anangu people and very few people get to see water cascading off of Uluru so we were actually pretty lucky to see it at this time! After the talk we walked the entire base walk - we came to the conclusion it was humungous from all angles!  The next day we had another early start for sunrise at Kata Tjuta followed by a walk through the valley of the winds. This walk saw us following a very questionable path, across rocks, up and down valleys and at one point climbing through a tree as the path had disappeared under water! The views however were spectacular and in some ways more impressive than Uluru. Kata Tjuta consists of 36 huge rock formations (reaching up to 500m) covering a 34km square area...it's quite incredible to be standing in quite a flat valley and having these towering over you - felt very small!!!!