Fooluru

About a hundred kilometres out from Uluru, a huge flat-topped mountain rises off the plain, and every first-timer in the car does the same thing. Sits up. Points. There it is!

It isn't. It is Mount Conner, or Atila to Anangu, the traditional owners, and it fools so many on this road that it has earned the nickname Fooluru. It is a mesa, a long tabletop, not the single smooth dome we had driven three days to see. But side-on from the highway it is genuinely enormous, and for a few minutes it is completely convincing.

We pulled in at the lookout for a proper look. Across the road, a red sand dune climbs to a wide view of Lake Amadeus, or Pantu, a vast salt lake lying as a hard white line across the whole width of the horizon. Purple wildflowers were out on the dune, which we had not expected out here.

A little earlier we had stopped at a roadside shelter for lunch, rice crackers topped with avocado at a picnic table, the car pulled into the shade beside us. The sort of stop that is unremarkable anywhere else, but welcome a thousand kilometres from the nearest city.

Then back on the highway, with the real Uluru now genuinely close.

Charging

No charging out here. We topped up that morning at Erldunda, the last fast charger before Uluru. The one stop along the way is Curtin Springs, a cattle station and roadhouse about 20 km on from the lookout, with petrol and powered campsites but no fast charger. If we were stopping there we could ask to use a powered site, but we're pushing on the roughly 245 km to Yulara, so we'll arrive on the charge we got from Erldunda.

Charging

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