Uluru and Kata Tjuta
Posted by Melissa on | July 27, 2008
We wake up very excited at getting to the next bit. The landscape changes again - more vegetation and a few wrinkles on the formerly very flat horizon. We are going to see the celebrities of the red centre - Uluru and Kata Tjuta (also known as the Olgas).
We refuel up at Erldunda - the roadhouse where you turn left off the Stuart Highway (if travelling north) onto the narrow Lasseter Highway - and are introduced to Opal fuel, which is designed to frustrate sniffers. Now all we need to do is drive the 260 kilometres west to Yulara.
There’s one choice for places to stay at Yulara - the green oasis that is Ayers Rock Resort. It is visited by more international than domestic visitors, and we will hear most European languages and a few Asian ones too as we explore. We pitch the tent (still shrouded in CP dust) and rush off to see the Rock, which has been appearing and disappearing behind low hills and bends in the road and making us gasp at its size and colour.
Ben is bowled over by Uluru and has to sit and contemplate this huge orange/red monolith for a bit before we walk around a section of its base. It will continue to surprise us as we return over the week to look at it glow at sunrise and sunset, and to walk and cycle around it. We discover waterholes and rock art, listen to creation time stories that describe giant dogs that leave paw prints on the surface of the rock, and accounts of the rock as a site for rituals and more see pedestrian purposes (such as the kitchen cave and the pensioners’ cave). My shoes are stained red by the earth and the many kilometres of walking, eyes directed upward at another formation.
We also visit Kata Tjuta - an amazing and extensive series of mounds and humps that bulge upward and outward, and are revered as a sacred site. We walk the Valley of the Winds - a 7-kilometre rocky trail that takes in lookouts, grassy open valleys, and passes sheer walls.
We explore the resort, which caters for all tastes, with apartments, hotels, spas, backpacker lodges, and caravan and camping sites. Guests can shop or have a manicure, fly over the rocks, ride a camel, or circumnavigate a landmark on a harley. Alcohol laws on aboriginal land limit bottle shop sales at bar prices to guests only, so we sip cold cold NT Draught at the bar. It is mild during the day but chilly at night, plummeting to minus two one morning. Warning signs spring up around the campsite after a cross-bred dingo wanders through camp one evening and shuffles through rubbish left at our neighbours’ tent door.
We extend our stay from three nights to six and still find ourselves reluctant to leave when the time comes.
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