Uluru!

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Hey everybody!!!

Ok, so I know I haven’t written in ages but there is a severe lack of wireless internet here, add that to the fact I have been working every hour under the god damn sun and I hope you can forgive me!!!!!

Here is the story of Uluru, when we first arrived in Alice Springs!!!!

So after our road trip, and a couple of days of chilling out, the boys left. Gem and I moved into the YHA, another hostel right in the centre of town, its pretty cool and has a swimming pool! We’re in a room of 6 but the room is divided in half, so we have our own little section.


We decided to get jobs straight away (well in fact we didn’t “decide” ….with $I in our pockets…… we didn’t really have a choice!!!!)

So setting off on our job hunting mission, we agreed to split and meet again in 2 hours to discuss progress! I walked up one street, gem up the other, and we bumped into each other 10 minutes later, both with about 3 jobs due to start the next day!!!

Gem started hers (in the Rock bar) that evening and whilst she was working, she met the two guys who owned the bar, well, they also owned the Rock tour office next door and they knew me because I had spoken to them a few times over the phone when I was working in Tribal Travel in Byron. I went in to meet them and they offered me the job there and then!!

They made me “travel manager” and they basically let me run the place when they are not there!! I have to deal with all the cashing up, commission rates, new contacts as well as booking and organising the tours!
Tough work, but after my first day, they said that as I was selling the tour, I’d have to go on it!!


Next thing I knew, it was 6am and I was clambering aboard a tour bus ready to go to Uluru!!!

I sat in the front with Dom, one of the tour guides, and we made the 7 hour journey down to Kings Canyon. Driving down was pretty amazing, it was all red desert and we saw loads of kangaroos and wild camels wondering around!!
I have since learnt that when ever you see a dead kangaroo, you have to pull it off the road, this is for two reasons, firstly because kite tailed eagles come down to feed on the kangaroo, and because they are Australia’s largest birds of prey and consequently are not scared of anything, they don’t move when a car comes, and so often get hit.
And secondly, there may be a little joey still alive inside the pouch (and incidentally if there is a joey, you have to put it straight down the top of the girl with the biggest boobs, “apparently” this gives the joey the best chance of survival and is not just an excuse to for the frisky tour guide examine all the girls boobs!!!)
So yeah, we frequently stopped to inspect a few bits of road kill!!

After a quick lunch on the bus, our first stop was Kings canyon, and it was amazing… although I thought I was going to die about a thousand times!! Now, the photos wont do it justice here but the first cliff we had to climb was a couple of hundred feet high and practically vertical!!! There were little steps most of the way up, but with my big canoe feet, I was balancing on my toes most of the time!! At the top everyone was gasping for breath, and being 50 degrees centigrade up there, we were sweltering!!!

Once we got to the top we then walked all along the ridge of the canyon (mum I think you would have had kittens with the shear height of it!!!) it was about a 7 km walk and Dom was forcing us to drink at least a litre of water an hour… good advice if you didn’t have to carry the water round with you!!

About half way we stopped at the garden of Eden, a magical little water hole! We went in for a swim… I say swim, I didn’t actually mean too.. I kind of fell in!!
It was so slippery all around the edge, that dipping my feet in ended in a bit of a disaster!! But to be fair, it was pretty nice and cooling!!! The rocks underneath were all slimy and as I moved around it felt like there were all kind of things alive beneath my feet!

I felt like I was in a scene from the latest Harry Potter movie, and honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if serpents, monsters and maybe the loch-ness monster was lurking in the depths!!

We carried on the walk, and learnt all about the trees and vegetation that live there, and how they manage to survive in those conditions! There is actually an under ground river beneath the canyon, and some of the trees have roots hundred of meters under the ground in order to survive.
We tried some of the “bush tucker” aka: berries (pretty disgusting to be fair!!).

After about 4 hours, we got to the descent (not half as bad as the climb up!!) and reached the sanctity of the bus!
After a short drive, Dom pulled the bus over and we stopped at a wooded area to collect firewood, us girls came into our own with this mission and got our hands seriously dirty breaking up dead trees, whilst the boys stood and gossiped!!! After piling them on top of the trailer we continued our journey.

Resting our weary legs and thankful to be rid of the zillions of annoying flies we drove to Curtain springs, which is a 2 million acre cattle farm. We stopped at the reception and bought crates of beer!! We then drove into the depths of the cattle farm and in the middle of nowhere set up our camp!

We made a big camp fire and put all the “swags” around in a circle. Swags are kind of heavy-duty sleeping bags, they have a small mattress at the bottom and the rest is canvas. They are rolled up in the day time, so we used these to sit on.

Dom started cooking over the camp fire and we all helped chop and stir… it wasn’t until it was actually served that it could be described. It was chilli con carne! It was delicious… and after all that trekking, was very welcome indeed! J

The group I was with were pretty cool, there were a few English girls that I got on well with, and the rest were made up of just about every country in Europe!! Warm by the fire, fed and with a few beers inside us, we tried to keep the happy chatter going, but I couldn’t actually physically keep my eyes open any longer.

As we put our sleeping bags into the swag and found a place on the ground to sleep, I’ve honestly never seen anything so amazing in my life.
The fear of snakes and spiders crawling into bed with me was soon abolished….. I was lying meters away from anyone else and it was so quiet, but it was the stars which were absolutely amazing… the whole sky was littered with them. You could see the milky way so clearly …a dusty white band of stars going in a thick line across the sky. Shooting stars were zooming about everywhere and to fall asleep to that was out of this world.

After 2 minutes of sleep (or so it felt like!) Dom woke us up for breakfast… it was actually 4:30am so at least we got to wake up to that amazing sky again! We had a lovely breakfast sitting by the remnants of the camp fire, and after we had drunk our fill of (disgusting) tea and eaten our (cold) toast we packed up the kit and settled back in the bus.

We drove to Kata juta or ‘the Olgas’ as they are more commonly known and because its so hot, we had to have completed the 10km walk by 11am!!!! The walk was so interesting, the olgas are basically a group of 32 massive rocks all grouped together. you can see Uluru from the Olgas and vice versa and a lot of the Aboriginal stories are based around these two places.

In the Aboriginal culture everyone is a ‘child’ until they go through initiation and become a man or a woman. Because we were obviously all ‘children’ in their culture, we could only hear the children stories about their way of life. They were really interesting, and all their artwork is based on one of these stories. I found it interesting that all their artwork is drawn from a birds eye view, and when I asked about this, I found out that because of their nomadic way of life and having to navigate massive areas of sparse bush land, they see everything from a birds eye view and can only draw and think in that way.

A lot of areas in the olgas were “men or women’s sacred areas’ and we weren’t allowed to take photos or anything, no-one knows what went on there but we got told a lot of the stories were about very dark and deep beliefs.

There was one part we had to climb up which was a sheer, smooth rock face about 30 feet high, getting up wasn’t too bad… it was the getting down which was difficult!! Yes, even I got a bit spooked out sliding down it in my Etnies!!

When we finished our walk, we drove to Ayres Rock resort and parked up in one of the massive pitched on the campsite. We all mucked in with preparing wraps for lunch. After we had finished we had a nice surprise and had an hour to go in the swimming pool… that was fun and seriously well deserved!!!

We got back in the bus and drove to the Uluru cultural centre, it was really interesting, we got to learn loads about their way of life. Basically, the aboriginals are bought up not to believe in having possessions, they didn’t own the land but respected it. the women would cook and look after the children and the men would hunt kangaroos and food. They moved around the land, some of the trees release their seeds with fire, so they would set parts of the land on fire to encourage re-growth, and then return a couple of years later. There was a map of all the different countries within Australia, but the boarders were all fuzzy, each area of land could be crossed by other tribes.

They had limited spoken language and the way they found their way from one place to another was by song. Say one man wanted to travel from Adelaide to Darwin, they would learn a song to get them the first part of the way, when they completed that, they would go to the tribe who lived there and they would teach him the next song to get him across the next 100km or so, this went on until he reached his destination.
They also had no written language, there are picture on the caves and stories were passed down by song.
When the children are about 8 years old and considered ready to be a “man” they are sent out in to the bush by themselves (with a couple of other children if they are of similar age) and they are left to fend for them selves for about……. 2 years!!! If after 2 years, they return alive, they go through initiation rituals to become a man. For example, when the boy returns to the tribe who lived on Uluru, he has to climb up the rock to a sacred point and get initiated there.

We saw the sorry book, and learnt about how Ayres rock was formed, there is in fact two thirds of the rock still underground, there was a Fault line split the rock and seismic movement in the ground caused the rock rise up and turn on its side. It actually gets 1 meter taller every 2000 years!!
So there you go!!

After the cultural centre, we went to the sunset viewing point, this is a small area surrounded with a tiny string fence and about 5 picnic benches in it, where tour groups can park up and watch the rock change colour. We were the first group there and immediately blagged the optimum viewing position! As we cracked open the beers, we watched the other tour groups where the average age was about 100, pull up and set up posh looking tables with champagne!!
The viewing area is in between the sun and the rock so as you watch the rock, the sun is behind you… and it really does change colour!! I only realised how much when I looked at photos and compared them every 10minutes or so.
We had dinner, Satay Chicken, whilst the sun was setting and it was awesome.

To be fair, I was amazed how un-commercialised it was there, there was no shops or restaurants, or toilets or anything, im sure if it was in England, they’d be fair ground ride and stalls and tacky little model of Uluru everywhere, but no, it really is just a rock in the middle of the desert!!

After the sun had set we drove back to camp and there was another tour group from our company there, I didn’t really think anything of it until I spotted Katie and Morag, two girls I lived with in Byron Bay!! It was crazy!!
So that night the two groups got together and we sat in a big circle drinking beer and playing games! We played the box game, where you have to pick up a box from the floor with your teeth and then when everyone’s done it, you rip an inch or so off the top! Now, anyone who’s seen me play this game knows I’m the most inflexible person in the whole entire world!!! But I was on form that night and stayed in till one of the last!!!! I think the fact we played it on sand helped as your feet don’t slip, but the game went on so long we had to dig a hole and put the box in it to finally get a winner!!!

When it was time for bed we simply unrolled our swags and settled down for the night. I wished I wasn’t so tired as I would have loved to have lay and look at the stars for hours, but it seemed I couldn’t keep my eyes open for more than about 2 seconds!!!

We got woken up at 4am the next morning (!) and bleary eyed drove straight back to the sunset viewing area. We had it to ourselves that morning as all the other groups go to the sunrise viewing area. But by going to the same place, we saw the sun rise behind the rock this time which was pretty amazing! We had breakfast whilst watching and soon after set off to the base of Uluru. There is the option to either do the base walk or climb. Our tour company doesn’t encourage doing the climb, for one, lots of people die trying to do it, and secondly, the top of the climb is a sacred Aboriginal area. The climb has to be made before 8am as after that its too hot, on the day we went it was closed (its closed 80% of the time anyway due to weather conditions) and although before I went I would have been tempted to climb it, after doing the tour I gained a respect for the culture and to be honest, its bloody high and steep!!! It takes over 3 hours to go up and down and there is no safety nets or anything, just a few tiny hand rails near the top. If you fall, you fall!!! That aside, I would have liked to watch other people climb! But as we didn’t have that option, we all did the base walk, where we went all the way round the bottom of the rock.

Uluru is amazing up close, its got so many caves and parts to it. there's the cooking area where the aboriginal tribe cooked and drew on the walls, the water hole where their food was caught and every place has got a story to go with it.
It turns out the rock isn’t actually called Uluru, as with a lot of Aboriginal words, when white men pointed at objects or areas and asked what they were called, there was a major communication error and when asked what the rock was called, the Aboriginal thought the English explorer was pointing at the sacred spot near the top of the climb, where boys become men, (which was called Uluru) and not at the rock as a whole.

The base walk took about 2 hours and we reached the bus at about 9:30am. It felt so weird to have completed so much, so early in the morning!!!
We had some cake and then started the journey back to Alice. We stopped at a camel farm on the way home and got to ride a camel around a pen! It was only a short ride but it was pretty scary!! I was on a camel with Hannah and there was a lot of squealing as the camel stood up!! They have about 5 knees and its not the smoothest movement in the world!
The camel walked up one side of the pen and then on the way back the camel man asked us if we wanted to run back… our protests landed on deaf ears as no matter how much we objected, those camels were going to run!!!

After 6 hours of driving we arrived back into Alice, I was absolutely shattered but there was just about time for a quick shower, and then we had to meet our group for dinner and drinks in the Rock Bar. We had a really fun night, it was amusing to see each other with brushed hair and clean skin, after spending 3 days covered in red dust!!

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Photos

heart attack hill!!!
the name says it all, the photo doesn't do it justice but man its steep!!

recovering!!
the group at the top of the hill!!

garden of eden
a random watering hole with serpents and snakes....or so it seemed!!

hi mum!!
writing with the rocks on a stone... the rocks were magically colored red, white and yellow!!!... amazing!!