Five days in the Red Centre: the climb is shut, and the walk round the bottom is better anyway

Start at the Royal Flying Doctor Service base, five minutes from the middle of town. This is the operational headquarters of a service that has been flying doctors out to remote properties since 1928 and still does, from a hangar behind the visitor centre. In the same building is the School of the Air, which taught children on stations a thousand kilometres apart by pedal radio for decades and now does it by satellite. Between them they explain how this part of the country actually functions.

Then, late in the afternoon, go up the hill. Anzac Hill rises out of the north end of the town centre, there is a road and a short path to the top, and from the memorial you can see the whole grid of the town, the Todd River, which is a dry sand bed for most of the year, and the MacDonnell Ranges running east and west across the horizon in an unbroken red wall.

Eat on the Todd Mall and turn in early. Tomorrow starts at the desert park.

Go to the desert park first thing, before the heat. It sits under the western ranges about ten minutes from town and it is not a zoo in the ordinary sense: it recreates three central Australian habitats and puts the animals that live in them into large enclosures, including a nocturnal house holding bilbies, mala and other small marsupials that have been wiped out across most of their range and which you will otherwise never see. There is a free flying birds of prey demonstration a couple of times a day, and the guides are excellent.

In the afternoon drive four kilometres north to the telegraph station. This is the reason the town exists: the original stone buildings from 1872 beside the waterhole that gave Alice Springs its name, restored and furnished, with the repeater equipment still in place. It is also, less comfortably, the site where Aboriginal children taken from their families were housed in the 1930s and 40s, and the site interprets both histories.

Finish at the arts centre on the western edge of town, which holds the best collection of Central Australian Aboriginal art anywhere, including watercolours by Albert Namatjira, who was born at the Lutheran mission west of here and became the most famous Australian painter of his generation while not being allowed to own land or buy alcohol.

Leave early. It is 450 kilometres to Yulara and about five hours of driving, straight and flat and monotonous in a way that is part of the experience. The Erldunda roadhouse sits at the junction two hundred kilometres down, which is the last reliable fuel, food and toilets, and then it is 245 kilometres west with the country slowly turning redder.

Kata Tjuṯa appears on the horizon first and a lot of people mistake it for Uluru. The rock itself does not show until you are close.

Check in, buy the park pass if you have not already, and then go straight out for sunset. The viewing area on the eastern side is a car park and a fence and it is completely worth it: the rock runs through orange into a deep red and then a purple grey in about twenty minutes, and the change is much faster and more total than photographs suggest.

After dark, the light installation in the dunes outside the village is the other thing to do on a first evening. It is fifty thousand frosted glass stems on solar stalks, laid across an area the size of several football fields, switching slowly through colour, with the rock as a black shape behind it. It was meant to run for a season in 2016 and it is still there.

Start at the domes, because they are further out and because the walk in them closes first when it is hot. Kata Tjuṯa is a group of thirty six rounded conglomerate domes about fifty kilometres west of Uluru, and the tallest of them is 546 metres, nearly two hundred metres higher than the rock. Fewer than half the people who come here bother with them.

The main circuit runs seven and a half kilometres through the middle of the group with two lookouts, and the ground between the domes is nothing like the flat country around it: shaded, narrow, with gum trees and running water after rain. If the forecast is above thirty six the track shuts at eleven, so start at first light. The shorter Walpa Gorge walk is a flat kilometre in and out and stays open longer.

Come back and spend an hour at the interpretive centre, which was built in 1995 to mark ten years since the land was handed back, and which sets out how the traditional owners understand the place, the law it carries and why the climb was closed. Go here before you walk the base rather than after.

Then do the base walk in the late afternoon. It is a shade over ten kilometres, flat, on a good track, and it takes three hours at a slow pace. What you find at close range is nothing like the postcard: caves, overhangs, waterholes, sheer sections stained black by water, and rock paintings in shelters. Signed sections may not be photographed. Bicycles can be hired at the car park if you would rather ride it in an hour.

Get up in the dark for the last morning. Sunrise here is better than sunset and much less attended: the rock starts as a flat grey silhouette, then takes on colour from the bottom up over about ten minutes as the sun clears the horizon behind you, and the domes catch it at the same time forty kilometres west.

You can do this from the boardwalk inside the park, which is the classic view, or from one of the lookouts on the low dunes at the edge of the resort village, which are free, five minutes from your bed, and almost empty. The central one has the best angle on the rock with the domes visible off to the side.

Then breakfast, and the airport is ten minutes from the village. If you are driving back to Alice Springs instead, leave by mid morning: five hours of straight highway is better done before the afternoon light goes flat.