The Bloody Red Hot Centre

..featuring special guest star... The Hunter.

The Hunter is notoriously camera-shy so pictures of her are rare. Here's one of a lizard instead..

Onto the famous and much-lauded Red Centre. Well, it was bloody hot, there were shit loads of bloody annoying flies, we saw a few bloody huge lumps of rock and did I mention it was bloody hot and there were shit-loads of bloody flies?

Perhaps over familiarity with Uluru (Ayers Rock) as an Australian icon led to us having overly high expectations. We may have been impressed had the rock sang, danced and shared a few clever, witty anecdotes as well as changing colour; but standing at dusk (sweating and swatting flies) in a big carpark, fighting for our space with bearded German tourists to watch a big lump of rock change from red to off-red was hardly a life-changing (or even mildly interesting) experience. The dawn showing was an even worse mass-produced tourist misadventure. Here's a picture of my (medium-sized) rock:
More impressive (and slightly more unexpected) was Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) - a strange looking collection of smaller more rounded bloody huge rocks. Here we had a stroll through the Valley of the Winds - an experience something akin to walking into a bloody large, bloody hot hairdryer.

Another interesting aspect of our trip to the Bloody Red Hot Fly-Infested Centre was our first real chance to learn something about Aboriginal history (real historic history as opposed to white Australia's 200 odd year-old version) and culture. We spent an interesting and informative couple of hours (sheltering from the bloody unrelenting heat and the bloody flies) in the Aboriginal Centre learning about the anangu people and their complex systems of laws and beliefs known as tjukurpa.

What with the bloody heat and the swarms of bloody flies it was a bit of a relief to escape to Melbourne after 5-days. We had fun though, and it was good to have someone else to talk to for a few days - not that Jools' chat is becoming tiresome or anything - completely the opposite in fact.

Cribbage Update: The bloody heat saps all your energy making comlpicated games like cribbage nigh on impossible. The bloody flies don't help much either.