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Published: June 14th 2006
Uluru and Kata tjuta
I thought it was supposed to be dry in the desert but when I woke up to catch my 6 am bus to Uluru it was pouring down. 2 hrs down the road, I woke up on the bus and the sky had turned perfectly blue. Cool !
I saw my first Kangaroo in the wild... too bad it was dead by the side of the road...
It seemed to be a good morning for wildlife spotting as the next hour I got to see 2 more kangaroo (alive this time), a couple of giant eagles, emus and wild camels. When we arrived at the campsite they had just caught a 'some color (I think yellow) faced whip snake'. Very small but with a lot of venom! I would never have seen it myself.
It's a magical experience to see Uluru (Ayers Rock: European name) rise up in the distance. A first stop was the cultural centre near the rock. Apparently few people visit this centre but I thought it was very interesting with lots of interactive displays on aboriginal life. There is also an explanation on why Aboriginal people ask you not to climb
the rock. I had a very hard discussion on this with some other travellers...
Here is the deal: Uluru is one of the most sacred places for the local Aborigines. It's very hard to explain how important these sacred places are to them. It all has to do with 'Dreaming'/creation concepts and stories, too long and difficult to explain here (with my very limited knowledge). Anyway the Aboriginals are the owners of these sites and they strongly ask people not to climb the rock. They feel responsible for everything that happens on the rock. And things do happen: people fell and got seriously hurt or died, which caused great distress to the Aboriginal community.
Now you probably ask: "If they own the land, why don't they just forbid people to go up?". That's another very touchy subject. When the Europeans arrived in Australia they decided that (as the Aborigines seemed to be nomads) the land of the country belonged to none (terrus nulius or some Latin law stuff) and they just claimed all the land for them.
This crazy fiction actually continued until only 10-15 years ago!!! Actually I found out here that one of my favourite childhood
songs (1987?) 'Beds are burning' by Midnight Oil is all about this: "The time has come to say fair is fair, it belongs to them, let's give it back".
Anyway, since then a lot of land has been returned back to the Aborigines. The lands at Uluru (and other tourist attractions eg. Kakadu) were only returned on condition that they were 'leased' straight back to the government.
As a result the Aborigines can't forbid anybody going up. Instead they politely ask people to respect their culture and not to climb (there's signs all over the place and every decent guide will mention this). Now I really like climbing mountains and and have great pictures. But, one of those lessons I have learned is that you should respect the ones that were somewhere before you. I had been in Oz for one week and Aboriginal people have been around for about 50,000 years so I guess it's clear where respect is due. I wouldn't go climbing altars in European churches or Buddha's in Asia either, so I why would I go climb this sacred site then.
Anyway most people seem not to care about all this (or are totally ignorant
to the issue) and go climb anyway and get "really great pictures"...
I went for the base walk instead. A great 9 km walk all around the rock. The views were pretty amazing. The colours and the weird shapes in the rock are amazing. After that we drove back a bit to see the sunset from some distance. It was nice to see the sky change colour around the rock but nothing beats sunrise. It was worth getting up at 5 am for and standing in the freezing cold for one hour. The change of colours in the 10 minutes when the sun really starts to rise is amazing. Every 10 seconds the colour changes. Amazing!
There was more swag sleeping at Uluru. It gets really cold there at night (almost freezing) so not a lot of snakes around (in hibernation) but it was strange to wake up and have a Dingo (wild dog) staring at me at 3 m or to hear them howl not far away when going to sleep.
Next stop was Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), another amazing site, where we did the 'valley of the winds' walk.
King's canyon
Next up
was another long drive to 'King's canyon' with a lot of singing along with the Aussie songs...hilarious stuff... ' G'day, g'day' , 'Bloke', etc.
An unexpected 'firewood collection stop' on the way, caused some raised adrenaline levels for yours truly. It's amazing how fast you forget all about the natural hazards of Oz. just 1.5 week after arriving in Oz there I was collecting wood in the bush on my flip flops!!! Pretty stupid... as I found out when one guy spotted a red back spider about 1 m from where I was standing. That little creature could have really ruined my stay in Oz. I jumped back on the bus and got some proper shoe wear on.
King's Canyon offered some more amazing walks while the sun was rising. After a crash course in geology, we found out there that the Grand Canyon in the US is actually not a canyon but a gorge.
On the way back to Alice we came across more wild camels and the really cool rock wallabies.
These last ones have an amazing camouflage outfit... you blink your eye and they seem to be gone.
Alice Springs
The 'big' town in
the middle of Australia (and nowhere) has a population of about 25,000 inhabitants and is the jumping point for excursions to Uluru & co. Most people hardly leave their accommodation there. I stayed for 3 days.
Alice Springs is one of the towns where one gets confronted with the problems of Aboriginal people in a modern society. You see them hanging out on the streets: drunk or looking for booze, wearing worn down clothes, not in shape, with swollen faces.
In Alice travellers are advised not to walk alone late at night...
I have been doing some reading and been firing questions at all guides and from what I understood it comes down to the following:
Aboriginal culture was traditionally a 'survival culture'. They were living in very harsh (desert) conditions and so they spent most of their time searching for food. They did not know the concept of 'working'. As soon as they had collected enough food for survival their 'work' was done. Sometimes that meant 'working' (hunting/collecting) for 20 hrs a day. Other times it was done in 2 hours.
These days it takes 15 minutes to go to the supermarket. As a result they have
too much free time. And what happens to people who have too much free time? They start doing stupid stuff because they are bored. In this case that 'stupid stuff' often involves alcohol.
Given that their bodies (through evolution) are not accustomed to alcohol consumption, things go really wrong. And that's what travellers can easily see in cities in Oz.
But of course not all aboriginal people are 'drunks' or 'troublemakers'. The ones that one gets to see in the cities are often outcasts that have been banned from their community. Back in the day if a person did something seriously wrong, the severest sentence was to ban him. In a desert this is basically a death sentence... These days it often means that the 'outcast' moves to the city where he benefits from the Australian social security...
Finding solutions for this problem is very difficult and it doesn't help that Aboriginal societies are very secretive and conservative.
...or that's just what I understood and maybe I got it totally wrong...
I went for a hike to the original Alice 'springs' which turned out to be just a muddy pool. Another thing I really enjoyed was my visit to
the 'largest classroom in the world'. The school of the air has pupils (6-12 years) in an area of 1.3 million sq km. Most children live on very remote cattle stations or ranger outposts (up to 1300 km away from the school) so they have to receive their education another way.
It used to be done via radio transmission but these days it uses the good old radio combined with e mail and chat boxes. In the school of the air museum I was able to actually follow one of the lessons in the studio and on the computers.
Also visited the Flying Doctors museum (where I witnessed 2 emergency calls in the communication centre) and discovered a reptile centre almost next door. The owner really loves his snakes. He was playing around with some of the most venomous snakes in the world and was a great source of info on the creatures. He gave some very useful tips and hints to avoid and treat snake bites. One thing amazed me in particular: snakes have a very short memory span and bad eye sight. So if for some reason you manage to piss off a snake, you should stand
still for half a minute and she will forget all about your presence and what happened...
After these 2 weeks in the Northern Territory I hopped on a plane and flew north eastward to Cairns for the run down the East Coast.
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nonkel Stef
non-member comment
de grootschalige school
Hoi, Jan... Dat van die school bevalt me wel. Hier zijn de examens volop bezig, en ik stel me voor dat ook hier zoiets eens volledig elektronisch zou moeten gebeuren, omdat de dichtsbijwonenende student van Zuid-Spanje moet komen. Onvoorstelbaar is dat. Hou je haaks en zwerf maar verder, ik volg je op veilige afstand. nonkel Stef en de Hermannen.