Uluru - the big red rock!

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Uluru
Another day that begins before the sun is even thinking about rising: another tour bus, another group of temporary friends. The tour leader this time is a fifty-year old named Lewis who meets me at the entrance to Toddy’s with a cheerful and amused expression. On board the twenty-five seater bus, I discover that there will only be six of us taking the tour, with an additional four to be picked up from Uluru itself.
Spread yourselves out boys, this one’s gonna be roomy.
I introduce myself to my fellows: this is a markedly older crew than any of the others: Laura and John, retired Ozzies in their mid-sixties, Patrick and Stephanie, in their late-fifties from Lyon, Nat, English chap from Melbourne in his early forties. That’s the lot! Eventually we are joined by Josie and Francine, short, stout, French-Canadian sisters, one of whom is a Principal of a Toronto school, and to whom I had a delicious rant about the insane pricks attempting to destroy my teaching fun back in Yankland: these woman end up leaving us in slightly acrimonious and mixed up circumstances mid-way through the tour - their travel agent had booked a flight that clashed, so they were forced to miss the second half of the tour altogether. The other two anticipated guests never showed up. Spookily enough, one of them got sick, so they stayed in the hotel in the purpose-built village, Yulara.
At first, I was thinking that this branch of the tour was going to be less social: I have a pattern in all of this. Typically, I get hyper-social for a few days, then search out a little solitude for a few days before ending up in circumstances that lead to meeting more people again. I usually circulate around this pattern for the duration of my trips away. I had a feeling that this new tour was going to be like that - but I was wrong: Firstly, these older people, while obviously more sedate than the younger people I’d met on some of the other tours, were pleasant and amusing people, as well as being especially astute and intelligent. Nat and Lewis were especially perceptive and sharp-witted people. Lewis, the tour guide, was not only extremely knowledgeable, but he had a great self-deprecating humor that was laugh-out-loud funny at times: when he showed up for breakfast in Ranger Rick shorts with socks pulled up to his knees (a very common and traditional look over here), I commented on this look, and he laconically described himself as a ‘bit of show pony’. John and Laura were very relaxed and nice people. The French couple were slightly more oddball: Patrick was a meteorologist who had a passion for photography. The pair of them were frequently to be found sprinting from place to place, snapping photos like mad and hyperactive paparazzi throughout the tour, with Stephanie becoming subtly exasperated by Patrick’s sudden sprints into the bush, chasing crested bush-pigeons, or odd shaped rocks, or whatever. Secondly, we kept on bumping into our Ghan buddies over and over again for the whole trip: Barbara and Andy, Larry, eventually Carly, Silke, the German girl who sat with Carly, the Dutch girl, Isabelle, over and over we meet at the stops on the tour. All the tours from Alice Springs basically follow identical routes it turns out. Some of my train buddies are on the four day Connections tour (I’m on the three day tour). Other Train people are on different tours that all follow the same circuit, so I guess it’s no surprise we bump into each other a lot over the course of the three days.
It all begins with a six-hour drive out to Uluru. I know that doesn’t sound like much fun, but it’s broken up by hourly breaks of up to twenty minutes, where coffee can be drunk, animals such as camels can be ridden () and turds may be deposited into long-drop holes. At each of these stops, I get to see Barbara and Andy, or Larry and swop a little anecdote or quip. It doesn’t seem to take much time before we see the forbidding shape of Fool-aru (actually Mount Connor, but many Japanese tourists apparently think it is Uluru, take a few snaps, then whizz back to Alice!) in the near-distance then twenty minutes later, Uluru, itself.
We spend half an hour at a cultural center where a fiendishly well designed but wordy exhibition expresses everything you could want to know about the Aboriginal perspective on this sacred site, so recently returned back into indigenous caretakers hands. I skedaddled through it really quickly - I wanted to get walking and get closer to this remarkable object.
I was totally ready to be disappointed by Uluru - what’s so special about a big red rock in the middle of the desert anyway?- but I have to concur with Bill Bryson and everyone else who visits this place - this is one of the most powerful places I have ever visited. You simply can’t take your eyes off the thing. It’s so familiar and yet so odd, so deep, definitely mystical, throbbing with an unearthly, vibrant power that reminds me of Jebel Mara in Sudan, an ancient and powerful, mysterious, exotic, magnetism that doesn’t show up in the pictures and movies. It hums and throbs at some deep level inside that connects things, that makes you want to stay for longer, to just sit and stare, to get sucked into it somehow. God knows what you would experience here on drugs, but even stone-cold sober it’s a cleansing and mystical experience, even for an old, crusty, non-believer cynic such as I! There’s something about seeing, especially Uluru, but also Kata Tjuta, the neighboring monolith/entity that just can’t be explained. Bill Bryson hits it brilliantly:
‘You feel an acquaintance with it- a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred…you feel certain that this large brooding hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level…I’m not saying that any of this is so. I’m just saying that this is how you feel.’
We walked around to the Mutitjulu Waterhole. Lewis is telling us all the Aboriginal myth stories attached to explaining the physically visible scars and cracks on the flesh of the thing. I say, ‘flesh’ because that’s exactly what the surface of the structure looks like: rusty, red scales. It’s like a giant, alien creature. The surface is a rocky, precipitous skin. We’re like fleas walking around a giant alien dog. The Aboriginal people call us ‘Minga’ which means ‘ants’!
We set off for a walk, called the Lungkata walk, around roughly half of the beast (if I had my druthers, I would have walked the ten-kilometers around the base - but it was too late in the day). I walked around Uluru dazed and stunned by this other-worldly behemoth taking a million photographs that will have all missed the point no doubt, tripping over all the time from walking sideways like a stunned crab!
It was all just a fantastic experience and a definite highlight of the entire trip. Even this one day alone would make the whole journey worth it - it’s that magical, honest!
After this walk, sharing the meditational quality of the experience with a similarly stunned Nat, who, like me, had been trying successfully to find some solitary time on the walk, I bumped into Carly who had hired a car and driven up and who had cried when she saw the monolith. Later, after more erudite commentary from Lewis, we headed off for the Sunset viewing area where champagne and snacks were served, where hundreds of people gathered in a frankly weird quasi-religious cult cluster to watch the sunset on the creature, only to have a thunder cloud perch over its head, blotting out the sunset. Here, at this frankly strange pop-festival/religious event, I bumped yet again into Larry, Barbara, and Andy and we generally made fun of the hordes as the clouds refused to co-operate with the paparazzi of cameras snapping away.
Back to the permanent tents, with proper beds in them we go, back to the excellent teamwork that spurred us to our first earthy meal, clean up, and fire, only to be rudely interrupted somewhat shockingly by a whopping great thunder storm and attendant flooding rains that drove all the poor twenty-somethings in their desert swags into a romantic night gathered around the washing machines in the camp laundry, and drove us away from the fire and into tents-ville on the second downpour, and into a comfortable sleep.
I slept pretty darn well this first night, only to be savagely awoken at the ungodly hour of 5:30am by our need to get out to the neighboring monolith of Kata Tjuta, a more unfamiliar to the general population, but equally gorgeous place. Unlike Uluru, this place was a whole host of odd structures numbering over thirty in total, with that same otherworldly ambience that magically haunts Uluru. The goal for the group was to watch the sunrise, then to go for a long walk before lunch to the beautifully named Valley of the Winds. After the breakfast I had eaten, I reflected, I may be about to visit more than one Valley of the Winds. Once again the sunrise didn’t co-operate with our paparazzi goals, when another low laying bank of clouds popped up at the critical moment and masked the sun’s burst over the horizon, but eventually the sun’s final bursting free from this cloudy blanket created a lovely luminous incident on the magical hills. The morning was pleasantly warm by the time we set off on this literally stunning journey. The walk was, quite simply, a fantastic affair. I walked the whole way around the circuit this time. I forged ahead and managed to find some lovely solitude for a good portion of the three hours, and the magisterial silence fell into me and one of my favorite three hours of the whole trip unfolded beautifully.
After this lovely walk we returned to the site, ate, packed and drove away for a three hour journey to King’s Creek, site of our next site, and spitting distance from our final day walk in King’s Canyon. Again we spilled out the stuff, claimed our tents, started a huge roaring fire (my job), then cooked up a load of food in the red-hot embers we created. Around the fire we had our most interesting conversation of the trip, much of it centered around the anomaly of the Aborigine Culture and its sad relationship to white Australia, generally. The history between these two clashing cultures seems so savage and bitter, so irredeemable and lost that it seems almost impossible to resolve. The most shocking parts for me are, firstly, how recently all this savagery has been happening, and secondly, how the two cultures exist side by side, effectively invisible to each other. It’s literally as if the other side doesn’t exist: as if two superimposed Universes are occupying the same space, oblivious to the existence of the other Universe.
So when the firewood was gone, it was time to crash out. Unfortunately, Laura in the next tent, who had been suffering with Hay fever and allergies all day was on full snoring power and seemed to be making a bid to break into the Oz national snoring team. I tried, but it was no use. I had to pick up and abandon tent in the middle of the night to get even a faint whisper of sleep.
The last day of the trip featured another early start, a lengthy, rather busy walk along King’s canyon, which may have been nice had we not kept overlapping with every other tour group in the known Universe. It seems that the tour guides go on a bit of a rampage here, stopping every hundred meters for some vapid or indeed worthy reflection, either from Geology, Folklore, Biology, or a Pythonesque sense of the absurd. Once again we’re bumping into Andy, Barbara, Larry, and others, over and over, especially over the first half of the walk after the steep Heart Attack Hill (a bit of a grandiose name for a little escarpment, despite the cave-like final resting place of the Austrian Doctor who’s tale was lavishly and with more than a little schadenfreude, gleefully told by Lewis: Our noble guide has a fondness for tragic stories about loss and losers!), but as the walk wears on, and especially after the detour through the Garden of Eden and The Lost City, we found ourselves with a bit more space and time. Finally we were able to talk about the great pantheon of Sci-Fi movies, while the French couple scurried around snapping away furiously, and the time passed. This walk didn’t have the majesty of the last two, but it was a pleasant way to while away a morning, especially facing the imminent six-hour drive back to Alice Springs that would bring this lovely and charming tour to an end.
And so it did.
Time passed.
The countryside passed.
I tip-tapped away on stuff like this.
We took a few breaks, saw a dingo who, it is claimed, can play piano, a few more emus, one or two camels and the like, and before we knew it, we were back, saying our goodbyes.
This was a good tour, in many ways the best of the bunch, especially the fount of wisdom and humor that was Lewis, the ease of travelling in a small group with loads of space to stretch out, the scrubby majesty of the green desert, the shining, humming, mystery and beauty of Uluru and Kata Tjuta.
I was looking forward to a nice easy next day or so: tonight the movie, postponed from last time, tomorrow, the civilized midday departure of the Ghan towards Adelaide and the final phase of my Australian sojourn.
I realized today that I could live here. It’s a great country, gorgeous and fabulous, but the thing that’s really selling it to me is the people.
‘No worries’, is more than a final parting gift from every conversation, it’s a statement of philosophy, and while it is obviously true that everyone has worries, it’s the beautiful optimism that reverberates through almost every Australian I’ve met, and the self-deprecating, but articulate humor that appeals to me.
I wonder if they need teachers over here.
See you on the flypaper…

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