It Never Rains At Ayers Rock

Well, never might be a bit exaggerated, but the chances of seeing rain when you’re there are slim at best. We, of course, had two days of rain, we were just very lucky I guess. Except us and some other tourists, everyone was actually very excited about the rain, even our tour guides later on kept making pictures for their private collections. But let me start at the beginning of the first day.

We left Darwin fairly early for our flight to Alice Springs, where we switched planes for Ayers Rock. Besides the fact that the flight attendant tore the little oxygen mask in two pieces during the safety instruction, ensuring us that our mask wouldn’t fail in case of emergency, the flight was pretty good. Our descent down to Ayers Rock airport was a bit bumpy, but the sight of the rock was incredibly impressive. It was much, much bigger than we expected it to be. When we arrived the weather still seemed to be pretty good, but later in the afternoon it deteriorated and it started to rain. We were booked on the highly celebrated Sounds of Silence dinner, but it was canceled due to the weather. The next morning the rain was gone, which was great because we were going walk the 9.4 kilometer track around the base of this magnificent sandstone. About 15 minutes into the walk, dark clouds appeared and no more than 5 minutes after that it rained again. This is not your average “how refreshing, a drop of rain”-kinda rain, no this is your “is this the Great Flood? I told you we should have build an Ark”-kinda rain. Every tour guide was smart enough to bring some ponchos with them, just in cast that it would rain, every tour guide except ours unfortunately. Except the being-soaked-due-to-the-rain-part, the tour around the rock was excellent and highly recommendable.

In the afternoon we had a sunset tour to the Kata Tjuta. The weather had improved a bit during lunch, so we were able to make some pictures of Ayers Rock and the Kata Tjuta without rain. During our walk over some of the rocks of Kata Tjuta, it did start to rain again, but this time we had ponchos to save the day. We finished the tour with Champagne and bread with bush Dukkah. All in all we had a pretty good time at Ayers Rock, though we were happy that our next destination was Broome, where sunshine is almost guaranteed.