You may ask yourself whatever possessed the spousal unit and I to fly into the middle of Australia, into the big central red sand desert, and begin The Red Centre Death March.

Um, we basically wanted to look at a famous ginormous rusty rock.

Oh, be quiet.

So, in the pursuit of looking at a famous ginormous rusty rock, we got on a bus and for five days had everything from when we could go to the bathroom to what we would eat decided for us.

When we started the tour, we thought that we would at least get to know some Australians. Australians are a wiley race, however, and not stupid enough to fly thousands of kilometers into the desert to look at a ginormous rusty rock, no matter how famous.

Oh no, as we were later to find out, Australians lounge around on ocean beaches partaking of tasty, alcoholic beverages, snickering at people silly enough to go on Red Centre Death Marches. So the other ten people on our bus were stupid foreigners like us.

Not everyone comes to the Red Centre to look at the famous ginormous rusty rock, though. There's lots and lots of beautiful wilderness to see and our tour packed a lot of it into a very short time.

Oh, and if you're one of those people who feel that speed limits encroach on your gawd given right to perish in a twisted hunk of burning metal, then you would love the Northern Territories, the section of Australia we were in.

The only speed limits on the roads are set around towns. Get out of town (and believe me, the towns are few and far between) and you can drive as fast as you want. As our bus hurtled south down the highway from Alice Springs, I decided that playing chicken with Aussie drivers and their famous road trains might not be a wise idea.

See, along with the usual roadkill, I spotted a camel.

Yes, someone took out a camel.

I'm thinking these are not drivers you mess around with, eh.

Our first stop was Kata Tjuta and a hike through its Valley of the Winds.

I think it was beautiful--at least the drive up to it was spectacular--but I'm not sure about the valley itself because we were basically frog marched through the two hour hike. Our guide only had a set amount of time to get us through it, the footing was extremely treacherous in several places because of steepness and loose rock, and so it wasn't safe very often to take your eyes off the ground in front of you and actually enjoy the view.

There were many places on the trail where other people, people with free will, were sitting and looking off in the distance with rapt expressions so I Suspect There Were Views. I just never got to enjoy them.

Back on the bus, this time to hurtle to the famous ginormous rusty rock so we would get there just before sunset which turns it to this colour:

The rock, for thems of you who don't recognize it, is Uluru.

Uluru is astounding. It has a presence that's hard to explain, and once you're there, you can understand why it holds such a big place in the Aboriginal dreamtime as well as in the imaginations of everyone else who has seen it.

The spousal unit and I had seen at least two television specials about it before we went to visit it, and in each case the show presented nothing but this huge rock rising in silent majesty out of a still desert.

Um, guess again. About 400,000 people a year visit Uluru. 380,000 chose the days I would be there, of course, which led Paul and I to rechristen it Zoolaru, because that's really what it was like. As our tour bus pulled in to the official "watch Uluru turn from beige to red as the sun sets" viewing site, we joined perhaps another 50 tour buses, many of them large coaches.

Big throngs of very noisy tourists, (more than a few of them aggressively elbowing others out of the way so they could get the perfect picture), milled around. Once it got too dark for pictures, we were all herded on our buses and quickly trucked back to our holding pens. Oh, wait, I meant to say our accommodations.

Our guide Tom set us all to camp chores, fed us, we cleaned up, and then we were sent off to bed with the warning that we would be roused at 4 a.m. for breakfast and another bus ride to Uluru so we could watch the sunrise and then either hike up it or hike around it.

Do you know how stupidly early 4 a.m. can be when you've been sleeping on an uncomfortable single person camping cot? Do you know how cold a spring night can be in the Australian desert?

Some people on our tour, I understand, also woke up with a goodly case of sand burn on the back and buttal regions because they'd tried to get in a little hanky panky on the floor of their tent the night before.

I, of course, wouldn't know about anything about *that*, eh.

Bleary-eyed, I gulped down my cold cereal, helped with the washing up, and marched back on to the bus. In the dark we again hurtled to Uluru, Enya playing on the bus' sound system, and joined the other 380,000 cranky, sleep-deprived tourists who were waiting for the sun to rise.

Did I choose that moment to flee into the desert under cover of darkness, to make my break from The Red Centre Death March?

Yeah, sure, as if I'm that bright.