Uluru

Our visit to Uluru has been a very good one so far, except for the flies. The flies are evil and should die, even though they are just doing what flies do. We have headnets to (mostly) mitigate the hordes that follow us around incessantly and crawl on everything and make us insane and I’ll stop writing about them now and get back to the good parts of Uluru even though I hate the flies oh I hate them so much.

The bus ride from Alice Springs two days ago was a neat way to see the scenery, although it did get a bit pungent over the last two hours after a passenger spent a while checking out the “emergency use only” facilities at the back of the bus. Noxious odors aside, it was an interesting ride; there were roadhouses with fuel, supplies, bars (!) and occasionally emus every fifty miles or so along the route, and not much else. I expected the landscape to be something akin to Mars, but apparently it has rained more than normal over the past few years so there was a lot grass and trees, making it feel a bit like Utah or Arizona with camel farms.

Uluru is just as unique and impressive as we thought it would be, a huge sandstone monolith rising from the flatness all around it. We had a bit of time to enjoy it from a couple of viewpoints yesterday before heading off to a fancy dinner under the stars where we watched the sun set on the giant rock while a man played the didgeridoo and we were served drinks and appetizers. Dinner started under a black sky with thousands of bright stars, but then an intense moonrise lit up the horizon, brightening the clouds and revealing the landscape. All the while they kept bringing drinks and food, and if I haven’t recently mentioned how the karma gods must have me confused with someone else, this dinner was yet another example of an experience that I’m not sure I deserved, but that we’ll remember forever.

After a late night and a lot of drinks I woke up at 5:15 this morning to catch the sunrise, jumping on the hop-on hop-off bus into the park. The bus left the sunrise viewing area a bit sooner than I would have liked, but from there they dropped me off for a hike to circumnavigate Uluru, which I was able to do at my own pace. The rock is amazingly scenic, with colors changing throughout the morning. I had to keep my camera in the bag for much of the hike since the aboriginal people do not want certain areas photographed, but it’s tough to capture how monumental it is from up close anyhow. Audrey came out on a later bus and did a walk of her own, and we finished the day with a nighttime visit to the Field of Light art installation covering 700 m² outside of the park and containing 50,000 lights, so we’re both going to be heading to bed tired, dusty, and fulfilled tonight.

Also, flies are terrible creatures.