In hindsight we could have done with another hours sleep, but hey ho. Up and out at 6.15 and after a 4 min walk to the bus stop, the bus arrived within 10 mins. Today we had even beaten the sun up!

By 7.30 we had dropped the bags, gone through security and were eating a breakfast roll each.

Our first plane left a few minutes late at 8.44, we arrived back in a very grey and rainy Melbourne and then had an hour to kill before the next flight. 

We had a walk round the airport and Dave grabbed a pie and myself a baguette to eat later as there were no snacks on these Virgin flights! 

The second flight out to Ayers Rock, now known as Uluru, finally took off about 45 minutes late at 12.45 but we landed basically on time. What with the 2 time changes, I completely lost track of what the time was, not helped by the Internet being down on arrival so none of the phones were updating. 

We were collected by coach and dropped at the hotel at 3.  During check in it became apparent that the hop on hop off buses actually needed to be pre-booked, so after finding our room we headed to the visitors centre to book a few things. It really is confusing here, there are numerous tours all very similar and all extremely expensive, no mention of what you can actually do for free. 

I had already booked the Field of Lights dinner for Sunday following recommendations, so we now booked a bus to Uluru tomorrow, leaving at 5.20am (gulp – another very early morning), booked 2 National Park tickets, then a guided walk for Monday afternoon to Kata Tjuta. We also had to buy 2 fly nets as the flies here are insane. That all set us back a total of £300! 

We had a little walk around and went up to the Imalung lookout where you actually see Uluru at a distance from the resort. It’s so hard to get a feel of the size of it. Feeling in need of a drink we then headed to the hotel bar. 

The temperature here was what they called a ‘cool’ 25 degrees and many of the locals had jumpers on.

Around 6.30 we went and showered and for the first time in over a month I actually blow dried my hair. 

An hour later we went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, which you couldn’t book, but it was now over-run and we were told it may be an hour wait, with no other options really available we said we’d wait it out. We actually only had to wait 10 minutes but were unable to get served at the bar in all that time. 

Surprisingly once we had finally ordered the wait for the food wasn’t that long and it was quite good. 

Around 9.30 we headed off to bed for a relatively early night.