Sleep in the Shadow of Uluru on This new Australian Great Walk

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

Seen from 30 miles away, Uluru appears no more than a hiccup on the flat horizon: as small as a termite mound, with the redness of freshly fired clay. Our group treads towards it in the morning light. Sometimes its form is obscured by the desert oaks that surround it: at other times it’s lost behind one of the long, sandy ridges that rise from the Outback. But it’s ever-present as we head east — our point of reference, like the magnetic north of a compass.

Australia’s most famous landmark is renowned internationally: familiar from brochures, posters and social media posts, endlessly photographed and filmed from tour buses and helicopter sightseeing flights by travellers who come to the Red Centre. And yet to make a long journey on foot and see its silhouette slowly emerge on the horizon — growing incrementally with every footstep — is a privilege few people have had in recent years. Although this is, of course, how the rock would’ve been seen in eons past.

I’ve come to hike the Uluru Kakararra Trail — a 34-mile walking route across the desert, culminating at the foot of the monolith, which launched this April. Around 10 years in the making, the trail has been developed in partnership with the Anangu, the traditional Aboriginal owners of this land. It traverses the often overlooked landscapes in Uluru’s shadow, allowing visitors to camp out in the national park surrounding it for the first time. The group is limited to just 16 guests and the operation is subtle in character — the philosophy being to travel lightly. Uluru is a landmark so familiar that the world is half-numbed to its wonder. To approach it this way is to see it anew.

The starting point for our walk is the rock formation known as Kata Tjuta — translated as ‘many heads’ in the Pitjantjatjara language spoken by the Anangu; it’s less famous than its neighbour Uluru, but far more intricate. Rather than being a single monolith, Kata Tjuta comprises a range of bulbous peaks, in between which are crevices brimming with life. Our first steps take us among grassy water holes and groves of river red gums. We clamber onward through canyons that echo with the song of wild budgerigars.

Ascending a windy pass, our guide, Marie-Charlotte Redot, peeks from beneath a broad-brimmed hat to explain the geology of Kata Tjuta and Uluru. The two landmarks, she tells us, were first formed 500 million years ago by sediment from a shallow sea and eventually tilted by tectonic forces, so their strata run almost vertically. Both rise abruptly from the plains — like interlopers from some other axis of existence — and both are sacred sites. Kata Tjuta is a place for men’s ceremonies in Anangu culture.

Marie-Charlotte explains that to the Anangu, the entire landscape is layered with meaning, its every landmark believed to have been formed by ancestor beings in a space beyond linear time, sometimes referred to elsewhere in Australia as ‘the Dreaming’. But these stories — and the ceremonies related to them — are closely guarded by initiates. Outsiders can only hope to skim the surface. “It’s sometimes hard to accept there’s a limit to what we can know,” Marie-Charlotte says. “We’re at the level of children in our understanding of this land.”

Our camp for the night lies on a sandy ridge overlooking Kata Tjuta. A cluster of tents is pitched beside wooden boardwalks; hearty meals are served in a simple off-grid lodge furnished with bright Aboriginal art. After dinner, I peek under my pillow to find a huntsman spider — a dinner-plate-sized arachnid from a horror film prop cupboard. My Australian tentmate assures me, with Aussie nonchalance, that huntsman are the “teddy bears” of the spider community, that their bite is mild and they’re best kept inside the tent, where they’ll eat flies. Through moments like this, I gain a visceral acquaintance with the desert on the trail.

Taken as red

Three days of walking follow. We rise before dawn and strike out in the cool, torch beams swinging through the gloom, the sting of the previous day’s sunburn still on our shoulders. Kata Tjuta recedes behind us as Uluru looms closer — in between the two, the sweep of the Milky Way forms a celestial arch, soon vanishing from sight.

As the morning hours progress, Uluru changes colour. In darkness, the rock appears obsidian-black, framed against a deep blue sky. It then turns violet in the half light of dawn, before slanting morning rays awaken its fiery pigment. Throughout the day — even in the harsh light of noon — the rock seems to preserve the burning hue of that first instant of sunrise.

Our path winds onward through a tapestry of landscapes: among eucalypts, above which brown falcons circle watchfully; and through stretches of feathertop spinifex grass that sway like wheat fields in the breeze. Time passes — desert sand accumulates in our socks. What can appear a lifeless expanse from a speeding car turns out, at walking pace, to yield a rich mosaic of flora and fauna. We crest dunescapes onto which lizards and snakes impart swirling tracks. We picnic under the canopy of the desert oaks, whose branches sway like willows in the hot breeze.

Our group is among the first to walk the Uluru Kakararra Trail — a route only recently pioneered by guides, so little trodden that undergrowth occasionally swishes against our feet. Yet we’re following in the wake of an older tradition. Kata Tjuta and Uluru were both desert oases where, in ages past, travelling groups of Aboriginal people would’ve rested and found water before moving on to fresh hunting grounds.

By a campfire on our last night, we meet Tjiangu Thomas (TJ), an Aboriginal guide with a quick grin who walks into our camp, emerging out of the darkness of the desert. He explains the significance of ‘Country’ — an English word imported here in the late 18th century from a soggy island on the far side of the world that, in Aboriginal Australia, has swelled with new meaning, encompassing not just terrain but ancestry, culture and an intimate connection with the Earth. This Country is rich in lessons, in its creation stories, but also in the plants traditionally used for medicine or as bush tucker. However, TJ is worried some people are at risk of becoming estranged from the old ways. “A lot of Anangu haven’t been through this Country for hundreds of years,” he says. “People stopped walking, they got Toyotas and rifles. But look after Country, and Country will look after you. When you spend time out here, you’ll learn to read Country.”

While some Anangu have lost meaningful connection with this land, travellers have come to experience it in their droves. Tour buses idle at Uluru’s base, sunset dining sites have been devised with the rock as a backdrop, light shows twinkle above it at dawn. Uluru has also been on a fault line in relations between Aboriginal Australians and the government. The Aboriginal village of Mutitjulu — set just beneath the rock — was an early flashpoint in the controversial Northern Territory Intervention of 2007: a child welfare policy that sparked accusations of racism on the part of authorities. A decade later, the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ called for an official voice for First Nations communities in government — a proposal rejected in a 2023 nationwide referendum.

Uluru can be a wellspring of strength, but Aboriginal communities continue to face many challenges. TJ is convinced that initiatives like our walk can help to preserve a culture often said to be the most ancient on Earth, braced against the headwinds of 21st-century Western society. “Some Anangu have become lost,” he says. “We need to show them there’s a cultural path that’s still there.”

The last stage of our trail is one of the most beautiful. We enter mulga woodlands with rough-barked trees that offer slivers of shade. Their canopy thins on the final miles, revealing the red crags of Uluru above us, about which tiny zebra finches dart. At the foot of Uluru, TJ rejoins us to tell stories about the beings the Anangu believe created the landscape outside of linear time. We’re politely requested not to repeat them; these stories are only meant to be encountered in this environment.

Walking the Uluru Kakararra Trail is no hardship, but arriving at Uluru it’s still possible to imagine the relief nomads must once have felt entering its sanctuary. Stepping among the shadows of its canyon feels like a homecoming after the wide-open desert horizons. The trickling sounds from its water holes seem like music after the single, lonely note of the Outback wind. Before I leave, I take a long look at the ‘scar’ — the crease left by the footfall of travellers who for decades climbed Uluru. The ascent route finally closed in 2019, when the sanctity of the rock was recognised by the Australian government. The ‘scar’ is a painful moniker, used among Aboriginals to come to terms with the desecration. The hope now is that visitors leave no mark on Uluru. Rather, the rock monolith will leave its mark on them.

Published in the September 2026 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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