Kata Tjuta and Uluru

The nights have been cool but not cold, around forty, with daytime highs in the lower seventies. Sometimes there is a chilly wind. The swag bag is suprisngly warm, sometimes too warm; the cool air playing around one's exposed head is a nice corrective.

The campground got noisy early, as most people headed out to watch the sunrise (parked on the opposite side of the rock). But we didn't.

Here's something I've noticed: just about all the white Australians I've talked to or overheard have called the big monolith Ayres Rock rather than Uluru. Ayres is of course the more recent of the two names, first applied by explorers in the late ninetheenth century, to honor a governor of the colony. Only in the last two decades or so have aboriginal rights to Uluru--for them it's a sacred site--been given much credence. Yet some of the signs here still say "Ayres Rock." There's also debate over climbing the rock. The aboriginal people consider it disrespectful, and signs discourage climbing. Yet there is a railing running up one (very steep) side and plenty of people go ahead and make their way to the top (which can be dangerous as well as insensitive: 35 people have died over the years).

Racheal and I drove thirty miles east of Uluru to Kata Tjuta, another big rock outcropping. But while Uluru is one vast mound, Kata Tjuta is a group of towering monoliths, big rounded peaks. And while the rock is a similar reddish hue, up close it's a conglomerate rather than sandstone. Also, Kata Tjuta is supposed to be a men's sacred site, while Uluru is more a women's. Not that I know how, really. There are signs up periodically telling you that a particular spot is important, and please don't take pictures--but there's no specific explanation because it's taboo to tell the stories, outside a group of initates and elders. Rachael went to a gathering of women out in the bush recently (as part of her work in aboriginal medical services), but couldn't tell me what she'd seen because she's not supposed to. She did say there was dancing and singing and body painting and what they call "mischief" (basically practical jokes) and "sorry business" (grieving practices). I guess that all amounts to telling me something, but she couldn't share details.

We walked up the Valley of the Winds, in among the monloliths, on an eight kilometer loop hike. The towering walls of rock were spectacular, and indeed there was wind. The valley flats between were covered with gum trees (what they call eucalyptus) and spinifex grass, and we saw a gray butcherbird. Below one steep bit between monoliths, a man was guiding his forty-ish wife back down the trail; she looked as if she had recently experienced panic. He left her at a trailside bench and returned to his two children, already at the top of the climb. One of the kids said, "I think Mom could've done it." The man laughed and said, "I don't think so."

After the hike we drove back to Uluru and ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. Then we walked around the base of Uluru, a ten kilometer hike. Up close you find that the rock is not as monolithic as it seems from farther back--meaning it's not simply a smooth mound. There are deep cuts in the sides, big black steps where falling water has worn bowls, overhang caves, pocked marked patches on the steep faces, even an occasional patch of shrubs growing in a divot. Two substantial waterholes, Kantju and Mutijulu, lay among tall trees at the foot of high falls. But both were dry, as it hasn't rained in some time. But it must be something to see, when rain does fall on Uluru.

The afternoon grew hot and dusty, and we were both "nackered," as Rachael said, by the time we got back around to the car. Numerous people were setting off on their own hikes, if not all the way around, then to one of the waterholes. Like in national parks in the U.S., these parks in the Outback, attract a whole lot of people. I watched with some nostalgia the families with children--though I didn't envy the man who was trying to coax his twelve-year-old daughter out of the shade of a big boulder and back on to the trail. She lay with her face against the cool rock and would not move. Back at the parking lot, I heard a father, standing beside an open back door, say, "now, wasn't it Bailey who had the middle seat before? Yes? Right then, Juniper, it's your turn to sit in the center."

In the morning, Rachael had said we needed to reach Alice Springs, 500 kilometers distant, before dark. But that would've meant giving up the Uluru circumambulation, and when it came down to it, she was unwilling to make that sacrifice. But there would be a price to pay.

We left the park about four, and headed east on the Lasseter Highway. Just at dark, we stopped at a small station, Mt. Ebenezer--a isolated restaurant and campground, with an aboriginal camp behind. A group of aborigines sat in the dirt across the road beside a fire beside an old car (this is what I've seen mostly when I've seen aborigines: people sitting, scattered about in the dust, not moving or talking). In the gum trees beside the station, a big flock of galahs--pink and white cockatoos--was screeching and tumbling about the branches. Exotic to me, pests to Australians.

We sat on a bench out front and Rachael drank a cup of tea. A man from Sydney walked past, and in a moment Rachael had him telling his story. He was English, but had moved to Sydney eleven years before. Now he was on a four-month trip, in a Land Rover Avenger with a trailer, adventuring across the Outback and out to Western Australia.

The propietor, a large man with clean-shaven head and tatoos up and down both arms and around his beck, came out the front door. He said he was closing the door but we could get into the store on the side. Rachael told him we were going on, and he said, "you're game, aren't you?" I wished he hadn't said that to her.

What he referred to was the danger of driving at night when the kangaroos come out. Rachael was already worried--it's why she'd originally wanted to leave earlier--and the commnet only confirmed her anxiety. Five minutes down the road, a kangaroo ran right out in front of us and Rachael slammed on the brakes and I fell forward hard against my seatbelt. Rachael said, "maybe we should go back and stay at Ebenezer?" But we went on. For the first hour we did not see one other vehicle.

She drove relatively slowly, about fifty mph, and I watched the left shoulder carefully. But she almost always spotted the kangaroos before I could shout "Roo!"--our agreed-upon signal word. They dashed out into the raod, or stood just off to the side on the dirt shoulder, which was almost worse since it seemed they could spring out onto the road at any moment. Some of them were, as Rachael said, "big fuckers," six feet high.

The next hours were tense, as we both strained to see the kangaroos in the dark. They were out in hordes, sometimes a dozen or so in a quarter mile stretch....Yet Rachael managed, growing more confident as we proceeded, though at any moment our good luck could've ended.... But finally we did reach Alice Springs, exhausted and relieved.