Introductory Note: Some people call it Ayer's Rock. The Aboriginal people use the name Uluru (which means 'meeting place'). I am happy to use either name, but I'm not going to type both names all the time. For this website, I have opted to use the name Ayer's Rock.

I flew from Sydney to Ayer's Rock, discovering to my delight that this involves a half hour time zone difference. I had always thought that time was chopped up into fixed slices of an hour each, so each zone is an hour ahead or behind its neighbour. Everyone I've mentioned this to thought the same. Yet the flight from Sydney to Ayer's Rock apparently involves some weird time vortex which displaces reality by 30 minutes, neither more nor less.

Ayer's Rock has had its very own airport for about ten years. It's perfectly practical, if a little basic: one runway, one big shack full of people arriving and leaving, one vending machine and one very busy coach park. I found my coach and was whisked to my chosen hotel in the Ayer's Rock resort. The resort is a miracle of compact self-sufficiency. It consists of a small number of very new, clean and compact hotels, all largely identical, offering everything you need for a short stay and not much else. There is a General Store where you can buy just about anything, and even a Post Office. The resort is quite miraculously invisible from even a short distance. All the buildings are fairly low, and the complex seems to have been unobtrusively tucked away in a natural dip in the land just a few miles from the Rock itself.

In under 24 hours, I was going to see the Rock in four ways: from a helicopter, at sunset, at sunrise and by walking around it.

The helicopter ride was truly stunning. My pilot explained that he couldn't actually fly over the Rock, because apparently the Aborigines consider this disrespectful. He did, however, fly every which way around it and as close as respect for sacred beliefs would permit.

Everyone has seen Ayer's Rock in books or on TV, and everyone knows it's a big reddish rock in the middle of Australia. Well-informed people will add that it's reckoned to be the largest single monolith in the world (although some claim it's the second largest, after Mount Augustus). The statistics tell their own story: 990 feet high, and 5 miles around the base. Apparently it also extends about 1.5 miles down into the Earth.

There is a wonderful fact about Ayer's Rock which I don't think comes across from the usual 'library' shot on a TV holiday show. It's simply this: Ayer's Rock is utterly isolated, to an extent that beggars belief. Stand anywhere on the perimeter of the Rock, gaze outwards, and the only thing you will see is the horizon. There may be a few scrawny trees, and a thin cover of scratchy grass, but essentially there is just a vast, sprawling nothingness from the Rock to the curvature of the Earth.

The next three shots convey a sense of scale. Look at the lower right extremity of the Rock.

See those specks down there? Those are cars and coaches packed full of people.

And a slightly closer view still:

I returned to my hotel, and after a brief rest, I got collected for Part Two of my extraordinary 24 hours at Ayer's Rock... click here to continue.