Uluru

I set the alarm for 4:45 and drove out in the dark because someone told me to, and I’ve been grateful ever since. The horizon was still charcoal-grey when I pulled into the viewing area, maybe two hundred metres from the rock’s base, and I sat on the car bonnet with a thermos of instant coffee and waited. Nothing happened for a while. Then everything did. The eastern sky turned gold, then the light caught the upper face of Uluru, and the rock went from brown to burnt sienna to a red so saturated it looked internally lit. I have never seen a colour change that fast outside of a sunset. I hadn’t expected to feel anything, and I felt a great deal.

Uluru is 348 metres high and 9.4 kilometres around its base, but those numbers do nothing. It is the absence of anything comparable that does it — the rock rises from an absolutely flat plain with no hills, no foothills, no gradual build. It simply exists, enormous and vertical, in a landscape that offers nothing else at that scale. The Anangu people, for whom this is a sacred site, have asked visitors not to climb it. There’s a quiet dignity in that request that I respected without difficulty. What I wanted wasn’t altitude. I wanted proximity.

The base walk is ten kilometres and takes three to four hours depending on how often you stop, which for me was constantly. The surface of the rock up close reveals something the photographs can’t: texture. Deep channels worn by millennia of water, caves whose walls still hold ochre and charcoal paintings, overhangs where the desert varnish has built up in dark streaks. The Anangu tell Tjukurpa — the creation stories of this place — through specific features in the rock, and even without full understanding you sense that the rock is not mute. There is a density of meaning here that takes time to begin feeling.

Thirty kilometres west, Kata Tjuta — the Olgas — offers a different register. Thirty-six domed rock formations clustered together like something between geology and architecture. The Valley of the Winds walk cuts through them at a height that gives a sustained view of how they relate to each other, the colours shifting from ochre to violet as clouds pass. Where Uluru is singular and commanding, Kata Tjuta is plural and strange. I spent a morning at each and ended the day at the designated sunset viewing area, standing in a line of strangers, all of us watching the same piece of ancient sandstone run through its evening performance.

I ate dinner at the resort precinct — there is only one, at Yulara — and the lamb was local and good, but what I remember more is driving back to camp afterward in complete dark with the Milky Way overhead and pulling over because I could not in good conscience pass it by. This far from any city, the sky is a physical object. You become aware of being on the outside of something, pressed against the glass.

When to go: May through August is ideal — mild days, cold nights, no flies worth mentioning. September and October are still good but warming. Avoid December through February: 45°C heat can close trails without notice and the experience becomes a survival exercise rather than a walk.