Uluru

When I first started this humble blog, I anticipated writing a lot about travel. Except I never left Victoria for nearly eighteen months. Now, with my journey here about to end, I have made two trips in the past month. I was lucky enough to make it to the Australian Outback and visit the landmark Uluru.

First, a little background on why, with time enough for one more trip, did we select Uluru? Well, before we left the States, I was at an Outback Steakhouse and saw a picture of it. I thought to myself, “Wow! That is a big rock in the middle of nowhere.” It just sort of stuck in my head as something cool, something that I might actually want to see. So we made the journey over to Oz and we have lived and worked in Melbourne.

(Irony alert: the actor in this commercial is Jemaine Clement who went on to fame with "Flight of the Conchords". Jemaine is a New Zealander and a running gag on the show was the Conchords insulting and being insulted by Australians.)

I do not want to insult the city that has been my home for nearly two years. It can be quite breathtaking.

This is one of my all time favorite pictures I have ever taken...

But... it fails to live up to some of my preconceived notions of Australia. I expected blokey, rugged men. I did not expect the men to wear women’s clothing. I joke, I joke, I kid, I kid - it’s not that bad. But it’s close. Melbourne has a very European feel to it. Not that feeling European is bad, but I wanted to see the “Real Australia” that I had imagined in my head from all the Foster’s beer commercials I had seen over the course of a lifetime growing up in America.

Additionally, I happened to work across the street from an Aboriginal art gallery. I, generally, don’t understand art, but I would wander into the gallery from time to time and look at the paintings. They are really quite stunning and I would leave feeling somewhere between intoxicated and euphroic. Simply said, I love the art. It is worth taking a look at some of the images on Google, but keep in mind these paintings can be on extremely large canvases and the tiny images you see on your screen do not quite do the paintings justice.

Julie independently walked into the same gallery and loved the art as much as I did. Unfortunately, neither of us loved the prices associated with said paintings and there was no way I could afford to buy anything in there. It got us to thinking though... Victoria has the lowest population of Aboriginal people of any Australian state. The gallery is in a pricey section of town. Where is the money going? It probably was not going to the actual artists and if we wanted to get Aboriginal art, we would be much better off heading off to the Northern Territory, much closer to the source. So, our shared love of Aboriginal art, my love of the desert, inspiration from the Outback Steakhouse, and the desire to see the real Australian Outback brought us to Uluru.

So why did we pick this particular weekend to go? Good question... Like workers in the US, Australians receive ten paid holidays a year. Some of the holidays are the same as ours like Christmas and New Year’s Day. Some are different but easy to understand, such as Australia Day being analogous to the Fourth of July. Some are perplexing like the Queen’s Birthday. I had no idea that Australia had a queen and that the Queen of England was also Australia’s queen. Speaking of the Queen’s BIrthday, each state in Australia has their own holiday schedule and have different days off. The Queen’s Birthday is, therefore obviously celebrated on different days for each Australian state and is nowhere near her actual birthday in any of them. All of this brings me to the most baffling holiday of them all, the Melbourne Cup.

The ladies really dress like this!

The Melbourne Cup is celebrated on the first Tuesday of November and is the biggest horse race of the horse racing season. That’s right, the people of the state of Victoria get a public holiday for a horse race. No, I am not making this up. It really is quite a big deal. The men get dressed up in suits and the women wear fancy dresses with silly hats called fascinators. WIth everybody so dressed up, they proceed to bet on horses and then drink way too much.

The Melbourne Cup is referred to as “the race that stops a nation”, but my naive mind could not get around the fact that it was held on a Tuesday. I mean who goes to work on Monday and then takes Tuesday off? Exactly! No one goes to work on Monday either. The honest take a vacation day. The dishonest “chuck a sickie” (call in sick). The slightly less dishonest “work from home”. Only the suckers actually go to work.

With a four day weekend approaching, I thought we would have time to fly the equivalent distance of Seattle to St Louis and the trip was on. I knew very little about Uluru before going there. It was once called Ayer’s Rock, but when the government gave the land back to the Aboriginals, it began to be called by its original, Aboriginal name, Uluru. It is the world’s largest monolith and it almost smack dab in the middle of the country in the “Red Center”. As for the Red Center, talk about truth in advertising. It is also quite hot, but I considered living in Phoenix, Arizona for fourteen years to be adequate training.

I have not been shy about voicing some of my opinions about Australia. Australians love to tell me that the United States’ policy of “security by theater” at the airport is a waste of time and money, is really annoying, and doesn’t make anyone any safer. They are 100% right. I love efficiency and having flown through the Melbourne and Sydney airports a few times in the past month, there is nothing that I would change. On Quantas, there are tons of unmanned kiosks with zero wait time. You rock up (in the Aussie vernacular) to a kiosk, put in some information, and the kiosk generates baggage tags. You then take your bags with the newly created tags to a conveyer belt. The bags are weighed and then scanned with lasers which read the barcodes and all the information needed to get your luggage to the appropriate location. Then the bags disappear, but show up fairly promptly at baggage carousels of the destination. At no point do you have to talk to anyone, which is my dream scenario considering I hate people. The kiosks are extremely intuitive and there is no waiting for anything. It is perfect.

Going through security does not involve taking one’s shoes off or submitting to an anal probe like in the US. It is quick, easy, and sufficient. If anyone thinks that Australia does not have to worry about terrorism like the United States does, they would be wrong. Australia has contributed forces to the ongoing battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tragically and senselessly, in 2002 a nightclub known to cater to Australians in Bali was targeted resulting in the death of 88 Australians. Australia does have a real terror threat, but have responded to it sensibly. I applaud this.

We left Melbourne and arrived in Sydney an hour and fifteen minutes later. From there, we changed planes for the three hour or so flight to Ayer’s Rock Airport. We got a glimpse of the rock from the plane and it is amazing how flat the land is and then there is this rock in the middle of nowhere just sitting there.

I had tried to set expectations with anyone who needed to contact me that I would be unreachable for several days. Upon arriving at the airport, I was shocked to find that my phone was quite usable and I had 3G coverage that was better than when I was in Telstra in Melbourne. In the middle of the desert. Go figure.

Normally, I rail against Australia’s anti-growth policies, but at Uluru, I think it has been done right. The airport and resort are a short distance from the rock. The resort we stayed at, the Desert Sails, offered an excellent room and nice amenities. There are a few other resort choices that are all connected and offer varying services. Honestly, I don’t know how we wound up at the Desert Sails, but I do not regret it.

"G'day, mate!"

We checked in and had a few hours to relax and unwind before our first booked activity - a walking tour of Kata Tjuta (also known as “The Olgas”) and a sunset viewing of Uluru. I changed into my “tourist outfit” - a San Diego Chargers jersey, matching baseball hat, and an SLR permanently slung around my neck. Julie and I walked to the “town center” to buy some water and sunscreen. I wandered into a t shirt store and fell in love with a leather hat complete with an alligator band and shark’s teeth. I wore it for the remainder of the trip.

As Julie was shopping, I approached an Aboriginal man playing a didgeridoo. I always kind of wanted to learn how to play this amazing instrument and the man was kind enough to let me try. Let me emphasize the word try. Julie video taped my efforts and the jokes kind of write themselves. I am not brave enough to post the footage here.

Kata Tjuta

AKA The Olgas

As we boarded a bus heading for Kata Tjuta, I admit that I had never heard of Kata Tjuta before. According to Aboriginal stories, both Uluru and Kata Tjuta were created by two young boys playing in the mud. Uluru was a fully formed mud patty and the boys moved on to Kata Tjuta. As the boys were making the second patty, their aunties came and pulled them away by their ears. Thus, Kata Tjuta was incomplete.

We arrived at Kata Tjuta and were warned a multitude of times to drink water.Julie and I walked through the canyon and took many, many pictures. I didn’t know what to expect as I had booked the trip on the basis of seeing Uluru, but Kata Tjuta was a great warm up. Before long, we were back on the bus for the sunset viewing of Uluru.

The tour included appetizers and wine. Being me, I didn’t pay close attention to where our table would be set up. There were lots of groups and lots of tables and I attempted to crash a German tourists’ table. Whoops. Anyway, I managed to make my way to our table and found a pathetic assortment of crackers, cheese, and vegetables. The wine was of low quality, but they made up for it in quantity.


They say that the rock appears to change colors during sunrise and sunset. Before the viewing, I would have said that this statement is pure marketing bullshit. Maybe it was the influence of the cheap wine, but I am actually inclined now to agree. We made some friends from Canada and took hundreds of pictures. Did I mention we drank? We did.

We were not the first and will not be the last to visit Uluru

Julie and I

We got back to the resort and decided to eat at the Outback Pioneer. I decided to get the “Aussie platter” and received raw emu, kangaroo, and crocodile skewers. Julie got a steak. We cooked our meat on BBQs underneath the southern stars as we listened to live music. Julie took our food to a picnic table while I went to the bar still in my full tourist get up.

“Hmmmm... I’m in Australia. I should probably have a Foster’s,” I said in my decidedly American accent.

The bartender looked offended. “Mate, no one serves Foster’s here.”

“But, ‘It’s Australian for beer, mate’.” I broke character and smiled. “I know. I’ve been living here for two years. I just can’t help myself. I love ordering it at every bar I go to.”

The food was good and the atmosphere was even better. We finished our dinners and went back to the room as we had an early wake up ahead of us.

Sunday we woke up early to go on a guided tour to Cave Hills in the northern part of South Australia. Our tour guides picked us up and told us a bit about the significance of the site. There are paintings in the cave that have been carbon dated to roughly 23,000 years ago telling the story of the Seven Sisters.

The sheer length of time that this story has been passed down from one generation to the next is simply shocking. The Aboriginal people appeared in Australia roughly 40,000 to 60,000 years ago and lived in isolation from the rest of the world until the late eighteenth century. In the West, by contrast, empires have come and gone and people have worshiped different gods and been ruled by foreign invaders for several millennia. The length of uninterrupted tradition is very difficult to comprehend. Between the timelessness of Uluru and the ancient stories, it is a stark reminder of how short and fleeting our time on this planet truly is. We are born, we grow, hopefully we have children of our own, and just as we actually gain a little bit of wisdom - we die. The Aboriginal people do their best to preserve the wisdom of the elders. As the parents hunt and gather, it is the responsibility of the grandparents to educate the children. It is kind of a cool tradition. Instead of grandparents, my kids get daycare which kind of sucks.

We stopped in a remote outback town to stretch our legs and use the toilets. We saw a flock of cockatoos and I decided to get a Coke Zero. I have a hobby here of complaining about how utterly expensive things are here, but in the middle of the outback the going rate for a small bottle of Coke Zero is $5.20. Sadly, I wound up buying three.

For some reason, this is what I thought Australia would be like

We pressed on with our journey and spent the next two hours on a dirt road into South Australia. Along the way, we could see multiple abandoned cars, mainly Holdens, in varying states of disrepair scattered throughout the desert. It ocurred to me that having a breakdown in the outback would be a very bad idea.

Note: This picture and the girl in the hat are the only ones that are not my own.

At Cave Hill, we waited at a rudimentary shelter made of corrugated tin as our tour guides got the Aboriginal elder. He went by the name of Wally.

This is Wally - note he is not wearing shoes!

Wally proceeded to walk us through the outback barefoot as he told the story of the Seven Sisters. I think he was talking in English, but I’m not really sure. Our tour guide was either translating for him or clarifying - it’s hard to say. The gist of the story goes something like this:

There were seven sisters who were all hotties. A guy spied them and decided that he would rape one or all of them and started chasing them around. The sisters then fled the would be rapist as chased them. The hotties decided to hide in a cave.

We entered the very cave of the myth and took a good look at the paintings. We were told not to take pictures and I respected the request. Trust me, the paintings were cool.

These are not the Cave Hill paintings, but it is a similar style

The sisters hid in the cave that I found myself lying on my back looking at the painting of the story. Now, this is where the story gets really weird... the would be rapist actually had two penises. He whipped one of them out and flung it into the cave. The sisters saw a giant cock coming at them and decided to run out the other side of the cave. The man in pursuit, apparently, caught up to his large, exposed penis and decided to wait in the cave as he was not aware that the sisters went out the back. He waited there for a long time and the sisters got a good head start on him. I kind of tuned out after the discussion about the two dicks and one of them going into the cave, but later the sisters made their way up to the skies and formed a constellation that can be seen from either hemisphere and transformed themselves into seven rock formations (one per hottie) scattered throughout central and western Australia.

Truth be told, I didn’t really care for the story and I didn’t think that Wally’s story telling ability was that great. However, I loved the art and I could tell that the story was important to him. Maybe it would make more sense on the hundredth telling, but I still treasured the opportunity to be on the site that was important to their culture.

Wally left and the tour guides proceeded to make a fire and cook steaks and onions. We ate sandwiches and talked to another family from Melbourne. The food was great and the company was even better and we eventually had to get back in the bus to go back to the resort. At the resort we had a really good buffet dinner at the Desert Sails. We made it an early night as we had a 4:30AM departure time for a sunrise at Uluru and a walking tour around the base.

Our camp - in the middle of nowhere

Fire! Fire! Fire!

I usually wake up before the alarm has a chance to go off, but when the alarm is set for 4AM, even I can’t beat it. I was rudely awoken from my slumber and proceeded to motivate Julie out of bed. Somehow, we managed to get dressed and make it on time for the bus, but we were both tired.

I think we were both too scared to say something to each other, but we were both worried that we had already seen the rock and that this morning’s tour would have a “Groundhog Day” like feel to it. Only it would be worse because we woke up at 4AM. I have never been so happy to be wrong. We took just as many pictures as we did for the sunset viewing but I think I could look at Uluru every day for the rest of my life and never grow tired of it.

With the sun in the sky, we got back on the tour bus and proceeded to take a bus tour. On the way to the climbing spot, our tour guide gave us plenty of mixed messages. We were told we could climb the rock, but the Aboriginals preferred that we did not. Since the late 80’s there have been almost two deaths a year from climbing the rock and the rock is only available for climbing 70 days a year and it is impossible to know ahead of time whether climbing will be allowed.

There was a part of me that really wanted to climb the rock, but Julie was adamant that we did not do it. She convinced me that it was disrespectful and I think she is right. The Australian government gave the land back to the Aboriginals, but in the eleventh hour insisted that the Aboriginals lease it back to the Australian government for 99 years. One of the conditions of the lease was the continued acceptance of climbing the rock. The Aboriginals really were not in a position to say no and it was a dick move on behalf of the government. I am really not trying to judge here as my government has pulled a lot of dick moves on our Native Americans, but I did have the choice to respect their wishes and not climb.

When we got to the base, I felt a lot better about my decision not to climb as I was wearing flip flops and the climb looked steep. I was pretty sure I could handle the climb up fine, but the thought of trying to go down a hill that steep, in flip flops, did not sit well with me. Regardless, the climb was closed due to weather which seemed odd as the weather was decent - at the time. It became clear to me that the Aboriginals really didn’t want people climbing and would use any excuse to prevent it.

That is one steep climb

We walked around the base of Uluru and I got close enough to touch it with my own hands and learn its history. Australia is one of the oldest continents and although now it is also the flattest, this wasn’t always the case. It once had a mountain range that rivaled the Himalayas. Over the course of millions and millions of years, this mighty range was eroded away. The sediment from this range pooled and there was an earthquake that popped the sediment onto its side like an ice cube from an ice tray. Now Uluru is all that remains of this mountain range and the sediment layers, which should be horizontal, are vertical because of the bizarre way the rock was formed. Cool, right?

Great shot by Julie - does not look like it was taken on Earth

Another Julie masterpiece

Finally, we ended our tour with a visit to the Cultural Center. I was nervous to see how much the paintings would cost but was relieved to see the paintings were roughly 1/8 to 1/10 the price of the fancy gallery in the Melbourne CBD. I walked up to one painting that caught my eye and told Julie I liked it. Julie proceeded to walk around the shop looking at every painting. After over a decade of marriage, I knew the best thing to do when she is shopping is to give her space. I went to the gift shop and read for a while.

As our departure time approached, Julie found me.

“You’re going to laugh,” she said, “but I think I like the one you pointed out.”

I smirked but somehow managed not to perform the “I told you so dance”. I’m not proud of this, but we held up the entire tour bus as we completed our transaction.

We went back to the resort after having spent seven hours taking photographs, staring at the rock, learning its history, and buying our first piece of art. We were tired as it felt like we had already put in a day’s worth of activities. We took a nap and spent some time at the pool. I kept on trying to order Foster’s as it never got old. By mid-afternoon, we came to the conclusion that our last activity, dinner under the stars, was going to be cancelled. After a six month drought, the Red Center finally got its first rainfall. The thunder was loud and the lightning flashed brilliantly as we made our way back to the room for a quiet dinner watching a magnificent sunset from the resort.

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better last trip in Australia. I have heard plenty of people say, “but it’s just a rock in the middle of the desert!” To which I say, “It’s an amazing rock in the middle of the desert with a rich history, culture, and significance.” Uluru is a reminder of the beauty of nature and the short time that we have here. Entire mountain ranges have disappeared. Cultures have risen and fallen. The rock and the Aboriginals have endured and being around that kind of timelessness gives some good perspective.