Uluru

It's known as Ayer's Rock, or Uluru. It was named Ayer's Rock by an explorer who thought he had discovered it. As it turns out, it had been discovered tens of thousands of years ago. And it already had a name: Uluru. It's a sacred spot to the aboriginal Australians, with many galleries, rock paintings, and carvings around its base. It's the setting for many stories from the dreamtime.

It's also a spectacularly beautiful outcrop of sandstone that changes colors constantly, especially at sunrise and sunset. We hiked around it, explored its margins, photographed it, and just stared at it, for three full days. We didn't tire of it.

We didn't climb it, either, even though that's a major "thing" for tourists to do, because the aboriginals don't want tourists climbing around on it. Not hard to understand why, if you visualize hordes of rock climbers belaying down Notre Dame or scrambling over the Sistine Chapel...

We took a sunrise hike through the Valley of the Winds in Kata Tjuda, a nearby series of sandstone hills. It's nowhere near as desolate an area as we expected; it gets too much rain to even be classified as a desert: it's an "arid savannah." Our hike was punctuated by flights of bright green parrots, sulfer-crested cockatoos, wildflowers, scrub forests, small waterholes, and springs. At times it seemed almost lush. And always the flaming red rocks against that impossible blue sky.

Watching the moon rise over Uluru was an excellent way to end an excellent trip, and that we regretfully did.

From Uluru we flew home, changing planes in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Los Angeles, over a period of 30 hours, including a 12-hour layover in Brisbane, where we slept a bit. A genuinely exhausting flight, courtesy of cheap Internet tickets that can't be modified in any way. Oh, well.

A long road, but one I would travel again. In a heartbeat.