Uluru and the Outback

Early Saturday morning we left the posh Langham Hotel, but not after seeing something that we couldn't resist taking a photo of:  two guys cleaning the flies on the Eureka Tower. Huh? you say, flies? Well, the building design is related to mining - the gold colour on the top windows represents the gold mined starting in the mid-1800s, and there is a red stripe hanging down from it representing the blood that was shed when miners rebelled against usurious rents for their homes and had a skirmish with police (that ended up changing the law, by the way). It wasn't until we started writing this blog post that the relevance of the bugs on the lower part of the building, which we had been looking at from our elevator lobby for two days, came to us. There are lots, and lots, and lots of flies in the Outback and mining areas. They don't bite, but they are quite the pest. They couldn't have designed a building devoted to miners without including these guys; and here's the photo:

After breakfast we were driven to Melbourne's domestic airport where we boarded our private chartered Fokker 70 jet that would take us to the Uluru Airport. Private chartered meant no security, no restrictions on carry-on, and no full-to-the-gills plane! Wow!!!

With a minimum of muss and fuss we loaded up and headed out. We were flying Alliance Airlines. Larry spent some time talking to one of our two flight attendants, and she explained that this was a strictly charter airline, mostly used by mining companies to ferry miners back and forth between the mines and their home cities around the country. As mentioned before, Melbourne was established and grew as a result of the discovery of huge veins of gold in the south. Well, the gold wasn't restricted to just that area, but can be found almost all over the country. In fact, Australia still has the largest amount of unmined gold reserves in the world. And mining is a huge industry, especially in the interior. We couldn't quite understand why the inflight magazine was called 'Rocks' and had lots of information and ads directed toward miners, until we got this information.

It was quite cloudy in Melbourne in the morning, and we climbed through the clouds almost immediately after taking off, but the effects of the ocean wore off quickly; the clouds disappeared, the terrain flattened out and everything seemed much drier. Here are a few photos from the plane:

The flight took 3 1/2 hours, about the same as a flight from Toronto to St. Maarten, and we were only going into basically the geographic centre of the Australian continent! Once we arrived and stepped off the plane, we were greeted by a wall of heat and humidity. It had only been about 21°C in Melbourne; at Uluru it was already 36° and nobody said anything about humidex! Apparently we got a bit of a break, since Georgina said they had been expecting 40°.

We met our driver, Leroy, at the airport. Georgina had told us that he was a typical non-politically correct Aussie, ready to speak his mind but not in offense to anyone. He turned out to be a real character, but extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of the history, the geography, the cultural significance of Uluru and the aboriginal people who have depended upon it for thousands of years.

While our bags were being taken to our hotel, the Sails in the Desert, Leroy drove us around for an introduction to Uluru, or Ayers Rock. He explained first that there is no really good reason for it being called Ayers Rock. An Englishman had come out and inspected and 'catalogued' the rock, but the only name he got for it from the aboriginals was 'Uluru'. He figured that nobody would understand that name, and since he wanted to get some funding for the work he had done, and might do in the future, he decided to name the rock after a rich and somewhat famous person. The first one he thought of was one Henry Ayers, who fit the bill perfectly, so the 'English' name for the rock became Ayers Rock. It wasn't until the 1980s that everyone started calling it by its traditional aboriginal name of Uluru. It is pronounced with the emphasis on the first 'U' - OO-lu-roo - for anyone who wants to know, and there is no translation for the name. People have said it means 'meeting place' but that's not accurate; it is a place where aboriginal 'countries', similar to tribes, have met for 20,000 years or more, but that's all.

Now, Uluru stands about 1,530 feet high, about the same as the CN Tower, and its claim to fame is that it is one single huge rock. But the rock is actually standing on one end. The other end of it is 3 miles underground! So, as Leroy had us vacationers trying to do some mental math (you can imagine how that worked out!) we determined that only 1/15 of its total length is showing above the ground. So this is one monster of a rock! The walk around the base is about 6 miles. How did it get here, you may ask. It is a common belief among geologists that the rock was pushed up during a massive earthquake caused by shifting in the earth's plates some 50,000 years ago. At the same time, the Australian continent hadn't yet been pushed up from beneath the sea. There is evidence of this from some of the sea fossils and shells that have been found in central Australia, not only by scientists, but by aboriginals, who of course wouldn't know what they were, not having ever seen the sea. Eventually the land was pushed up and the ocean retreated, but not before Uluru had been sticking up for quite some time. Erosion in the lower sections and some of the cavelike horizontal cuts are evidence of this.

Leroy took us back to the resort where we got checked in (no unpacking necessary - we were only staying one night) and spent some leisure time at the pool. We would be heading back out to a sunset viewing area for a cocktail and canape reception, and, hopefully, some really nice sunset photos.

Sails in the Desert, Main Building

It is quite amazing that so many people are interested in watching the sun set over a rock in the middle of nowhere! Not only were we there, but at least 4 other organized tour groups as well as a whole bunch of individual travelers. Of course, Tauck got the prime spot at the end of the row with a shady covered area for anyone who needed it. The temperature hadn't gone down much, but there was a bit of breeze to keep the humidity under control as well as the flies. We talked about flies earlier - one of Georgina's offerings in our travel packs was a fly net to put over our heads so that the flies wouldn't get into our mouths! Fortunately, we found that we didn't need them here - they would only interfere with the eating and drinking anyway. We had watched the clouds build over the course of the afternoon (not really a usual thing, but some clouds always help to make a sunset), and hoped that the breeze might blow some of the them away. Unfortunately, we didn't get rid of enough of them soon enough, and the beautiful, multi-coloured sunset we were looking for became a bit of a washout instead. As Larry has been saying, 'Now we know what happens when we arrange a sunset party and the sunset doesn't show up.'  Let's see if we can make them a little more dramatic than they actually were:

....don't all these people have anything else to do in the evening?

Playing with photo editor sure makes things look more dramatic

How do you like the 'fly net' fashion statement?

Of course, not getting the gorgeous sunset we were looking for just means that we'll have to come back and try our luck again! We headed back to the resort for dinner and a bit of down time. We were expected to be up and at the bus by 8:30 for the morning's tour: 50,000 years of history condensed into 3 hours!

Sunday morning, of course, dawned without a single cloud in the sky. Doesn't that figure!

We had been given the basic geological history tour of Uluru on Saturday; we were now heading for the cultural history tour. We had had a very brief stop at the aboriginal cultural centre at Uluru on Saturday afternoon where we had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with aboriginal history, but now Leroy put 'faces to stories' as it were as we walked some of the paths on the opposite side of 'the Rock' from Saturday's drive. Speaking of walking, one of our tour mates, Jim, was a great one for being active, so he had arranged to take the early morning shuttle bus out to Uluru, and walked the path ALL THE WAY AROUND it, a total of 6 miles! He met up with the group at our first stop.

Some of the geological features that were caused
by water but now have cultural significance
to the aboriginals

Leroy trying to draw an aboriginal story in the sand. He complained
that the only bad thing about William & Kate's visit was
that the government had the pathways packed down so hard that
he can't draw properly!

These cave drawings are between 1,000 and 2,000 years old and were
the first 'written' communications between aboriginals. They still
don't write, believing that writing things down will reduce
the importance of the older generations in passing down legends
and skills to the younger ones. 

Leroy has been driving and guiding tours around Uluru for over 20 years. He knows the local aboriginals very well and has a quirky but memorable way of presenting the stories of Uluru to the likes of us so that they and their meaning won't quickly be forgotten. Leroy is so well thought of that last year during William and Kate's visit he was their tour guide at Uluru!

The aboriginals used stories to pass on their values and morals between generations, and many of those stories have a basis in the markings around Uluru. There are over 1,600 'countries' or individual aboriginal groups, each with its own language, but because they all came to Uluru at certain times of the year, they also all had the same bases for their cultural mores. Leroy also explained how the hierarchy worked. The Grandmother was the one who made all of the social decisions, including who would marry whom; the men went out to hunt to ensure that there would be food. In each family, the grandparents were responsible for rearing their grandchildren, and the grandchildren were responsible for taking care of their grandparents. This was because the 'grey-hairs' were known to have all of the knowledge that the young people would need to learn in order to survive. One of the very interesting aspects of how these countries all got along with each other was the way that marriages were arranged. The elder woman of the family would make 'marriage deals' for her grand-daughters, but only with certain other countries. It was forbidden to marry within your own 'country'. This improved diplomacy and relations between families that might otherwise have fought each other, and at the same time reduced the number of people in one family or country that would be dependent on its hunting, gathering and food management abilities.

The Snake drawn up on the rock came to attack the
Lady Python. She killed him to protect her eggs and
take revenge for her family, and now can be seen keeping
guard below.

We made a stop at a small lake in the shadow of the Rock. It didn't look like much, but to the aboriginals it was very important, so important that swimming in that lake was not allowed on penalty of death. Why? Because it was the primary source of drinking water! But one story Leroy told was that, if a country came to the lake and for some reason it was dry, the grandmother would tell everyone to go away while she worked her magic. What she didn't tell the young ones was that there is actually a very large lake at the top of Uluru that holds huge quantities of water after rainstorms. She would send a few men (women were not allowed to climb Uluru) to open dam gates at the top and let water flow down into the lake, they would then close them to preserve water. When the children came back and found that there was water, they would believe their Grandmother to have magic powers. This served to reinforce the understanding that the elders had much to teach the young ones and that they should pay attention and learn.

The drinking water lake

Don't look like much, but they worked!

Here we are with Leroy

This looks like an aboriginal warrior's head facing to the
southeast. Legend has it that the country from that
region is responsible for Uluru, as in fact it is.

Once done with our tour at Uluru, Leroy took us directly to the airport where we reboarded the plane (with our same flight crew from yesterday - Tauck put them up at Sails in the Desert with us) and headed toward Cairns. This must be one of the hardest names in the English language to pronounce, unless you're an Aussie and used to dropping your r's. It comes out sounding like Cans, or maybe C-ah-nz. We were probably all on the plane leaving before we got it figured out!  But we'll leave that visit for the next posting.  Here are a couple of photos of Uluru from the air:

Our private plane