As you fly from Oz’s tropical coast to its aptly named red center, you watch the landscape below slowly change from rolling hills covered in copious greenery, to long stretches of neatly divided farmland, and eventually to smooth, rust colored sand as far as you can see.  But the martian landscape at the red center was nowhere near as empty as I had expected it to be.  Thanks to a long rainy season this year, it was covered with scrubby bushes, sprinkled with desert oaks, the occasional gumtree (eucalyptus in the desert!) and even broken up by the a few lonely pools of water.  But it’s still empty enough that when Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) sneaks up on you, you can’t help but think it was dropped there by aliens.  And contrary to popular belief it does not stand alone.

Yulara

From the plane you can also see the neighboring peaks of Kata Tjuta (formerly The Olgas) and a tiny sparkly dot in between, the resort town of Yulara.  As much as Upolu Cay was the coolest place I’ve ever been, Yulara resort was the weirdest place I’ve ever been.  This resort/town was built in the mid 80s specifically to service tourists to Uluru, a site which receives a steady flow of tourists year round.  Yet somehow this college campus-esque resort felt practically empty.  The only constant company you have during a walk around the resort is a multitude of beetles, stickbugs, crickets and a constant entourage of flies who seem more interested in the moisture in your eyes than in the resorts four pools, or the sprinklers that water its needless stretches of bright green lawn.  But empty or full, it’s the only place to stay within five hours of Uluru, and with it’s surcharge on all credit card purchases, additional charge for any bus transport to Uluru itself and rooms in need of renovation at over $400 a night, I think it must be the most brilliant tourists trap in the entire world.

Nonetheless, we took advantage of what it had to offer, starting with a self grill BBQ at the Outback Pioneer Hotel.  The menu offered such Aussie meats as croc and roo, but I opted for the emu sausages, which were quite delicious.  The Outback Pioneer also became my first introduction the Northern Territory’s tendency toward lack-luster service (although I won’t lump the tour bus drivers into the group) and one of its undeniably backward notions.  At the bar you could not order a drink without showing them your room key.  The lackadaisical bartender explained that the local aboriginal population was not allowed to drink, thus the policy.  I was shocked.  Never before have I truly understood what it must have been like to live in a pre-civil rights movement society.  It turned out she had dramatically oversimplified the law.  As I now understand it, the vast majority of the Northern Territory is dry with the exception of certain areas, chiefly resorts and hotels, that are allowed to sell alcohol, but none is to be sold or even consumed within a 2 kilometer radius of said areas.  The general belief is that this will discourage the aboriginal population from drinking, without having to enforce a blatantly racists law.  Of course, the Outback Pioneer’s policy (which doesn’t seem to be backed by any official law that I could find) would prevent anyone from the local population (mainly aboriginal) from having a drink.  Do feel free to bring this up with the management there, should you happen to be heading that direction.

Kata Tjuta

The next day we decided to head out and see one of the sites that had actually brought us out in the first place.  Kata Tjuta is a striking series of rock formations in the same area as Uluru but decidedly overshadowed by its fame.  It’s a testament to how vast the center of Oz is, that you can see both Kata Tjuta and Uluru from the resort, but it still takes at least 45 minutes to get to one of them.  With the heat desert sun only increasing exponentially throughout the day, you have to get an early start.  We stopped along the way to check out a closer view of the range of helmet-like peaks.  Once out in the open desert, you immediately befriend the flies, so many that the constant buzz around your head is like a special sound effect from a horror movie, and the fight against the urge to whack at every tickle on your arms becomes a matter of mind over fly.  But even a short hike around Kata Tjuta isn’t spoiled by your buzzing chaperons.  Between the mounds of conglomerate rock that look like bright red concrete, sits a pleasant gorge full of little pockets of fresh green growth and trickles of water containing tadpoles, lots of them.  Imagine that, frogs in the desert!  Life will always find a way.

Sounds of Silence

One of the better advertised and more deservedly praised events offered by one of the tourist companies at Yulara is the Sounds of Silence dinner.  This outdoor Aussie buffet starts with canapes and champagne at sunset overlooking Kata Tjuta (which the bus driver accurately observed looks like a sleeping Homer Simpson) followed by a dinner in the pleasant silence of the surrounding nothingness, and ending with a star talk during which you learn that it’s not at all easy to find south using the stars.  Through the telescopes they had set up nearby I saw Saturn, which looked just like a glow in the dark sticker, and the super bright moon which looks more like a slowly boiling potato soup than cheese to me.  I would have gladly stayed up to look at the stars until the moon dropped below the horizon, but we had to make a 5:15 am bus to Uluru the next day, so back to the 80′s era hotel we went.

Uluru, a.k.a. The Rock

The day started while it was basically still nighttime (4:30 am) and so dark that you couldn’t see a thing behind the headlights of the bus except the bright stars in the sky.  I didn’t realize until then that I had so well adjusted to the site of the southern cross that it looked rather odd upside down.  But I was very energized (which is hard to do on instant coffee) and ready for the world famous sunrise over Uluru.  We stationed ourselves on the sunrise platform . . . and so did everybody else.  As the light crept into the sky, tour bus after tour bus filled up the parking lot, and the entire sunrise viewing area slowly filled up with a colorful sea of T-shirts, hats and backpacks.  Cameras clicked and beeped all around us.  And the flies eventually figured out we were standing there, ready to be buzzed at.  Maybe I’ve seen one to many beautiful red mountains in my lifetime.  Maybe I’ve just seen too damn many postcards of Uluru since I moved here, but I simply didn’t get it.  The mountain didn’t look like it was on fire.  It didn’t seem to glow from within.  I wasn’t touched spiritually.  It was a beautiful sunrise in a beautiful place, and that’s all.

We started our base walk at the same point where the climbers were scrambling up the well worn path to the top.  Despite a few shallow patches, I can see why people tend to faint, vomit and otherwise experience general discomfort while trying to climb the rock.  It’s far from a gently sloping hill.  And even though a lot of people were starting the climb, it still seemed like less than half the people from the sunrise platform had come out for the up close and personal view, and less than half of them were doing the base walk.  So for the next few hours it was essentially us and the rock.

Uluru is not just an amazing shape, but an amazing combination of shapes, positive, negative and everywhere in between.  There are niches and little shady gorges all around the edge, strange holes resembling alien and monster faces carved into its surface, and flat little pockets with surprisingly lush trees growing right out of them.  The skin of the rock itself is not completely smooth, as the postcards would have you believe, but scaly flakes in a multitude of browns and reds.  And the environment around the rock changes with every kilometer, ranging from flat sandy nothingness to waist high grasses and sparse forests of twisty trees.  I couldn’t take pictures of the all of the beautiful places at the rock, because much of it was sacred ground and there were signs requesting that no photographs be taken.  I was a little disappointed that honoring the aboriginal culture in this way, meant not honoring our cultural tradition of photographing beautiful places we want to share with others, but maybe if I hadn’t seen so many pictures of the Uluru sunrise before I had gotten there, it might have maintained a bit more of it’s spirituality. Nonetheless, the base walk proved to be an even better experience than I had imagined.

Unfortunately, after you have spent 4 hours walking in the increasing heat of the day, the park around Uluru has one last hurdle to throw at you.  The bathrooms you’re so desperate to visit at that point (the only ones near the rock itself) are at least five minutes away from the road.  And the visitors center, which you need to get to in order to make the bus ride back, is another 2 kilometers away!  The parks planning people may have had to work around a lot of sacred ground when building the visitors facilities, but I still can’t forgive them for building the worst planned national park ever!  It’s no wonder the flies hitch a ride on all the tourists, they too are probably too tired to fly the distance they have to go for a simple bathroom break.

Don’t spend 4 days in Yulara

If you don’t have a car, or preferably a private jet, to get to any of the other destinations near Uluru (and by that I mean within a four hour drive) don’t spend more than two days in Yulara.  You can only go to the same resort restaurants, swim in the same pools with the other trapped tourists, and walk across the same nonsensical green lawns so many times before your life starts to feel like Groundhog Day.  But I was rather happy that I had stayed near Uluru much longer than the average tourist’s in and out in 20 hours visit.  The culture diversity that this one rock brings to the dead center of one of the more isolated countries in the world is astounding.  Even if most of them weren’t quite sure why they were there, they had been drawn there nonetheless.  We came from every corner of the globe.  We stood together and watched the sun rise and set over the blazing red desert.  We ate kangaroo just because we could.  We swatted at (and occasionally swallowed) the same flies.  And we all got stuck with the same surcharge on every credit card purchase.  And that, to me, was a spiritual experience.