October 27-29
Wanting to round out our Australia visit a bit, and on the recommendation of our good buddy Leigh from the Antarctica and Capri portions of our trip, we found our way to the Northern Territory to visit Uluru. We made it to the Outback! We made it to the bush!
Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. It is a sacred site to the Pitjantjatjara Anangu who are the Aborigines in the area. The name Uluru come from the Anangu. The name Ayers Rock comes from 1873 when a surveyor named William Grosse saw the landmark and named it in honor of the Chief Secretary of South Australia at the time, Sir Henry Ayers. The land was inhabited for over 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. In the 1920’s the land was declared an Aboriginal reserve with the first European settlements beginning in the 1940s. The Australian government returned ownership of Uluru to the Anangu in 1985.
Our first view of Uluru:
Except that isn’t Uluru. It’s actually Mount Connor which is the site from which Grosse first saw Uluru. So we kept driving a bit further through this incredible expanse of nothing but dust, clay, pockets of grass, some bushes and cows who roam freely on the road making the drive quite dangerous.
Uluru is one of Australia’s most recognizable natural landmarks and stands 1142 feet high with a circumference of 5.8 miles. We chose to hike on the path around the rock which ended up being just about 6 miles long.
A theme you’ll find in this post is that we didn’t prepare properly for this trip to Uluru. I was in dark pants and a dark shirt and we were worried about hiking 6 miles in the middle of the day in full sun and heat.
What we should have been worried about was the incredible hoard of aggressive flies that attacked us for the roughly two hour hike.
I am not standing still in that picture. I am walking with a brisk pace and the flies are just content to hang out on me and relax until they are rested enough to dive bomb my ears again. It was basically an exercise in not going crazy.
https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/img_6658.movIt’s a shame because the hike would have been really enjoyable if we weren’t trying to finish as fast as humanly possible. The rock formation is incredible and there is definitely a sacred feel to it.
Most of the holes and ridges in the rock are caused by rain runoff.
I would definitely recommend people come visit, but with a fly net covering their face. Other people, better prepared, had them. This is a disadvantage of nonstop travel – you don’t always do enough research before arriving to a location.
Uluru has great cultural significance for the Anangu people. There are many Anangu traditions and stories that accompany Uluru. Apparently the Anangu women were the story tellers in the communities and were responsible for keeping the traditions. Many of the tales correspond to cuts and boulders at Uluru which speak of serpent beings, war and death.
The stories we read about spoke of morality and the proper way to behave. In cases of people making the wrong choices by stealing or being lazy, they were murdered and their bodies were left at Uluru as a reminder to future generations. There was also a great story that outlined a woman’s requirement to trust her instincts and protect her family at any cost, no matter how brutal. The stories were passed down from grandmother to granddaughter as family inheritance.
In the picture below it looks like a profile of a skull.
With such dry weather, there is obviously a constant concern of fires. In the picture above, it seemed like a fire had just swept through this bunch of trees. I could even still smell the charred smell, although Michael disagreed.
The holes in the below rock come from marsupial moles. They spend most of their time underground and only come out after rain. They are blind, have soft, golden-colored fur, and are small enough to fit in your hand. They use their front paws like spades to tunnel horizontally just under the surface.
The flaky surface of Uluru results from the chemical decay of minerals and it looks rusty because it… you guessed it… is rust. The sandstone has iron in it which turns to rust when exposed to oxygen. Chemistry.
Did you know that eucalyptus covers roughly 227 million acres of Australia? Me neither! It is the tallest known flowering plant on Earth.
The scent of eucalyptus is overpowering in many areas that we’ve visited in Australia. I love the smell. It makes me think of walking into a Ben Franklins craft store, which then makes me think of penny candy.
One of the main features of Uluru is that it appears to change colors depending on the time of the day and the year. Most significantly it glows red at sunrise and sunset.
We were excited to see Uluru at sunset, so we sat around for a few hours to see the crazy red glow of the rock!
Getting closer!
And then this happened:
Beautiful clouds, but we lost the sunset behind them. So we didn’t get to see the amazing red glow. Time to get on the road and drive back.
Besides the plethora of cows, there were also kangaroo crossing signs. We saw a few unlucky kangaroo that seemed to have been hit by unlucky cars. Michael caught a glimpse of a few running along the road later that night which required slamming on the breaks and some added anxiety. This was just after another incident where we had to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting three cows that were hanging out on the road. With no streetlights, driving at nights was a mistake on our part, but we were unprepared. We had planned on driving out one day, staying in a hotel and driving back the next day. But by the time we looked into hotels, the few that were in the area were all sold out. All of them. So instead we had the good fortune of driving back to Alice Springs the same day. It was an incredibly tense drive, but Michael really nailed it.
We stayed in the nearest large town, Alice Springs, which is 280 miles away from Uluru and is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory. The town lies on the Todd River, although that river is typically dry – as you can see from this picture I took while running along the river. Google maps thinks there is water there.
Although we experienced no problems while we were in town, Alice Springs has a lot of issues with strong racial divide. From what we could tell it was definitely a poor town with problems typical of a poor town. There were quite a few people living under the bridges and wandering around town who seemed to be homeless and/or unemployed. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza that is next door to the casino. We walked over our first night to get dinner and the casino is like a casino you see in a poorer community. The place is depressing with people whose eyes have glazed over from staring at the screens mindlessly popping their paychecks into machines.
The city center was not much better. It had a very depressed feeling to the entire town with many of the stores and restaurants closed when we wandered through late afternoon on a Saturday.
We have now spent a few weeks in New Zealand and Australia, two countries that often seem too good to be true. The locals are kind and have a relaxed attitude towards life, and both countries really have an excess of natural beauty. It is a bit of a (very selfish) relief to find out that these countries have their own problems. Well Australia at least. New Zealand may still be perfect. We had heard anecdotes about racism towards Aborigines in Australia, and similar to some of the problems we have in the US right now, there is a lot of animosity towards non-white immigrants.
While in Barossa I had the chance to watch the 2008 Baz Luhrmann movie, Australia, with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It was a bit long, which made it feel that much longer when I made Michael watch it just a few hours ago. But I think the film helped me understand at least a sliver of Australia’s history with the Aborigines. It spoke of the “Stolen Generations” which were the mixed-raced children who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and put in church missions for roughly 65 years ending in the 1970s. It’s shocking to me that it was still happening so recently. It is believed that between 10 and 30 percent of indigenous Australian children were taken during this time. The thought was to assimilate the children into white society.
Not surprising, the children of the Stolen Generations ended up less likely to have completed a secondary education, three times as likely to have acquired a police record and twice as likely to use illicit drugs verses Aborigines who grew up in their ethnic communities.
All of that info is from Wikipedia and I’m by no means even close to being properly educated in this area. However, the movie helped shine a bit of light on it and helped me to understand more about the history of this area. It was also a pretty entertaining love story set in the Australian Outback. If you have a chance to see it, you should. Michael even enjoyed it despite his groaning about watching it originally. I found it on Netflix, but it may not be available on Netflix in the US.
Tomorrow we will be flying back to a major city: Sydney!