We Go to a Land Down Under -- V

That's One Big Rock

Thursday, Oct. 6

We have an extra hour this morning before we depart. Feels positively decadent, or something like that.

We will be on the road for most of the day driving to Yulara, the resort village near Uluru, which used to be called Ayers Rock. (It’s kind of like Mount McKinley in Alaska. A white surveyor named in honor of another white guy, but the locals always refered to it by its aboriginal name, and it's now the preferred official name.)

Camels were imported, and some were released into
the wild where they multiplied and are now
considered to be a nuisance. 

We'll be heading south and then west, covering about 277 miles, about 30 miles less than the drive from Midland to El Paso. Like this latter drive, there's not much to see, scrub and dirt, the occasional mountain. Unlike the El Paso run, we won't be encountering towns along the way. Oh, there's a couple of places to stop, Camel Farm, a tourist stop where some of our folks take camel rides around a track that might be a quarter-mile long, and a couple of roadhouses where you can get a bite to eat and find a modest place to stay, but that's about the extent of it.

And you'll rarely see traffic. I may have this wrong, but I think that while on this road we see a “road train,” a semi pulling several trailers behind it. I believe this one was pulling three.

Tony’s trickster nature rises up again during the trip. One of our stops will be in the middle of nowhere where we’ll get a chance to see a large salt flat, one of many that dot the area. Before we arrive at the stop, Tony says he’ll give $50 dollars to whoever is the first to spot Uluru. But if he/she is wrong, then the passenger will owe Tony. According to the schedule we’re a couple of hours away, but hey, we’ve never seen it and it might be so high and the ground so flat that you can see it from a long way off.

Mt. Conner

Sure enough, not much time passes before we’re able to see a large mesa on the horizon. Is that it? Some folks swear it is. But of course, it isn't. It's Mt. Conner, Atila to the locals. Part of this trick is just the way Tony is – he likes to mess with us -- but I think it’s probably also an effort on his part to encourage people to pay attention to the travel itinerary he gave us the first day. It's a good try, but the itinerary will be ignored by some people in our group pretty much up to the last day.

We stop at a lookout to take pics of Mt. Conner and climb a small sand dune to check out a salt flat, one of many that dot the route. Then it's back on the bus until we reach the Ayers Rock Resort, our home for the next couple of days. The resort is a conglomeration of hotels, shops, a museum, and restaurants whose sole purpose is to support tourism for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. It even has a small IGA grocery store that we will frequent.

Whereas Melbourne was blustery, rainy and cool, Yulara is sunny, dry and hot. Remember, they are as far into our spring as we are into fall, and the daytime highs are already in the 90s and forecast to hit 100 on the day we'll leave. Summer highs can go as high as 140. 

This night we’ll travel to a viewing area to see Uluru at sunset. Mind, there are hundreds of other people there to see it, but that doesn't detract from the experience. I would make a comparison to our trip to the Grand Canyon. We’d seen the pictures, but nothing prepared us for the grandeur of the actual place.

Uluru is “only” a bit over 1,000 ft high, but it's almost 6 miles around and sticks out in the middle of a mostly flat, scrubby, red plain. We're told that geologists believe it's like an iceberg, with some 80 percent of the formation lying underground. It's also loaded with iron, which makes it turn a rusty red at sundown – and sunrise, so I’m told. We skipped the opportunity to check it out the next morning.

While walking down a path to find some other angles on the mountain, we encounter a family. Sharon and the boys keep wandering up the path while I stop for a picture, and the parents start chatting with me. They’re Aussies on holiday and seem genuinely interested in whether we’re enjoying our vacation. I tell them how much the area reminds us of far west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Before long we’re chatting about our regular lives. They live in a town on the east coast that the father says is the eastern most spot in Australia.

The "arty," and now trite, shot,  Click to see this bigger
and notice that the mountain appears upside down in
Sharon's glass of water.

Uluru starts out being a sort of drab brown, but as the sun dips, it begins to brighten to a startling rust color, only to become drab again as the sun drops below the horizon.  I've dozens of pictures, and I realize I will have to turn one of them into a poster to come close to capturing the impact.

We return to the hotel and take a short walk into the central square to buy fruit and TimTams. Then it will be time to call it a day.