G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 11.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up and reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told using my journal entries written during the trip. This is what one might call a serial, in that it is a story told one installment at a time, in this case, once a week. So if you’re into that idea, you might head back to Letter #1 and start there. It’s a long trip, so no worries. We’ll wait.
You’ll probably figure this out, but I thought I may as well mention that the quoted bits in the letter below are the journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps with road grime, a spare tyre, and a lot of red dirt.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other ten letters here, written on the bonnet of a car.
Finally, I’m pleased to have a little more art to include with this week’s letter, contributed by my brother Nick. He’s a handy artist, working in wood cuts and prints and something called giclée, which sounds like ice cream but unfortunately isn’t. You can find more of his work here.
And now, to your letter.
Luke
There’s a lot of hype surrounding a certain big red rock called Uluru, and hype is overrated in my book. Maybe I’m just a contrarian, but if a place has a very high rating on Google Maps, I consider it suspicious and move on. If I see internet ads proclaiming that ‘Australians are going crazy for this simple weight loss hack’, I’ll toast to those Australians with another beer. Blockbuster movies and ‘Must See TV’, I give them a miss.
There’s no place worse for hype than the world of travel. Throw a rock within the internet and you’ll hit a top 10 or a bucket list. Social media spreads travel hype using something called travel porn, which is like regular porn except it is pictures of people fully clothed and they are not having sex. Instead, you get people feeding pandas at sunset or riding rickshaws up mountain peaks. Like all porn, it makes you feel excited at first, guilty in the end.
Uluru has made many of those books and lists and porn sites. In contrast to idyllic Sydney, the face of Australia, a cosmopolitan city filled with attractive tanned citizens who say ‘G’day!’ to all passers on their way to the beach, Uluru is like an alternative reality. It’s an enormous dome-shaped rock, rising from the middle of the desert like a giant jumping pillow. Everything - the rock, the land, your body by the time you leave - is a deep, rich, red colour. The main citizens of Uluru, and the little accompanying tourist village of Yulara, fly in or arrive on tour buses from Alice Springs, wearing khaki shorts held up by leather belts, along with comfortable shoes. The shorts and singlet wearing residents are outnumbered by flies, large contingents of whom buzz around your head and threaten to go up your nose at a moment's notice. The food at Uluru is crap, the diesel is expensive, and the weather is usually hot.
And yet, all the hype around Uluru is well deserved. There’s nothing like it.
You can see it for miles around, a looming shadow in the distance. You’ll be traveling through a landscape that’s relatively flat, covered by red sand and dead-looking scrubby bushes, when all of the sudden there’s an enormous red dome. It looks, at a distance, like a giant red blood blister on the face of the earth. Or a loaf of bread. Or perhaps the top of a giant’s head, hair combed forward, and buried up to its eyeballs. Maybe a hamburger sitting on the griddle that is the Northern Territory?
Ultimately, Uluru is Uluru-shaped because, like I said, there’s nothing like it. But what do you think?
In any case, it has a magnetic presence.
If only I could poll William Gosse to see what he thought of Uluru when he first came across the rock in 1873, he being the first European explorer to do so. He named it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, Chief Secretary of South Australia. When I was growing up, that’s what it was called - Ayers Rock. That’s what the encyclopedia said, and that was that. What I don’t remember anyone telling me is that the Indigenous Ananda people have been living around Ayers Rock for at least 30,000 years. So naming it after a second tier South Australian politician seems a bit rich, but that's what you do as an explorer - name things you find after friends or people to whom you owe money. That said, nearby is a group of rock domes called Kata Tjuta that Australian explorers originally called ‘The Olgas’ after Duchess Olga of Württemburg. At least Henry Ayers lived in the neighbourhood.
Happily, the European placeholder names have started to move on. If you’ve read any of the other letters I've sent you, you may have noticed that a couple of the places we visited have two names: Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre. Ikara - Flinders Ranges National Park. That’s because Australia has slowly been restoring Aboriginal place names, or giving places two names in the interim. Uluru was one of the first to get its proper name back, having jettisoned the Ayers Rock moniker back in 1993. Name changes have picked up the pace recently, and have begun to include renaming of places named after people or places with checkered histories. As I write this, our local council has just begun using the name Merri-Bek - meaning ‘rocky country’ in the language of the local Aboriginal people - instead of Moreland, which was named after a Jamaican slave estate.
Or you can simply call it the big red rock if you want, and people will know what you are referring to. In any case, we’d arrived late in the day after a long drive from Coober Pedy, and would be staying for two nights.
13th October 2019 - Uluru
I woke up before the 6.15 alarm, and I hate waking up before the alarm, especially when it is already an early wake up. I’ve got to be up early, so why get up a little extra early? Enjoy all those minutes allocated to sleep. It’s like you’re selling hotdogs for $5 each and when the time comes and you’ve got a customer, you accept $3.75 for it.
The weather in Uluru, as has been the case almost everywhere our whole trip, is unseasonably hot. Yesterday was 40 degrees C (104F), today was 40 degrees, tomorrow will be 40. It won’t cool down to normal for a couple days. So we awoke early to go walk around the rock.
Uluru’s bigger than you expect when you go to walk around it, the 10 kilometre trek taking a couple of hours along a flat sandy path. One of the things I find so amazing about Uluru is that from a distance, it looks smooth and almost symmetrical. But neither is the case, which quickly becomes apparent as you get closer, and you spot the rolls and folds, holes and caves.
The rock changes as you move around it. New features become visible, others change and recede as your perspective or the light changes. It’s kind of like a lava lamp, something you can look at for ages and never get tired of it because there’s always something different. There’s another nook, there's another cranny, a ridge, a boulder, a piece that fell off and is lying on the ground. In some spots there are rock paintings. It’s easy to understand why it is a special place in the eyes of the Ananda people, to whom many of the features of Uluru are parts of their lore.
As we walked around, the four of us each walking at our own pace, the temperature continued to rise.
It all went really well until about 10am, when the weather started getting hot, which sent Henry into a tailspin. He’s got this problem where he says out loud what is going through his head that would be better off staying in his head. Especially when he’s hot, tired, frustrated, or some combination of the above.
‘This sucks!’ He says.
‘It’s so hoooooot,’ he groans.
‘We should have taken the Segway tour,’ he moans.
No, we shouldn’t have taken the Segway tour. Never. I’ll do that only if lunch at the Olive Garden is included.
But we all made it, despite his temporary black cloud.
I did not tell Henry, but perhaps should have, that had we taken the Segway tour we still would have been hot, and we’d have also looked like jerks, as you do when riding a Segway. Why make things worse?
Our walk started and finished near the spot where you begin the climb to the top of Uluru. People were out in full force for the climb when we began our walk around the base, and as we walked into the distance, you could spot a line of them walking up the side of the rock, looking like ants climbing back to the top of their anthill.
But the crowd had dissipated by the time we completed our loop. Someone had fallen down the rock and broken their arm, so they closed it down for the day.
William Gosse scrambled to the top when he first came across Uluru, and the walk to the top has been contentious ever since. The Ananda people have been respectfully asking people to not do the climb, because they consider Uluru sacred. The National Park has nonetheless allowed it. That is until 26 October 2019, two weeks after we left, when the climb to the top of Uluru was closed for good, a win for the Ananda people.
It has been hot here, no place hotter than the spot we’re camping, which I can best describe as a Walmart parking lot on Mars. It’s flat, covered in deep red dust, and devoid of any vegetation aside from a tiny bush we parked next to, just so we could make an effort at finding some shade and ambience. There are a couple dumpsters scattered around, and two or three fire hoses sitting abruptly in the middle of the area. Just in case you or something you own bursts into flame from the oven- like conditions, I guess.
Just off the edge of the camping car park there are a couple of large blocky buildings which I understand comprise the power station for Yulara. Our spot is called the ‘overflow’ camping area, basically a refugee camp where you take whatever space you can get, wherever you can get it. A little bit lawless in that way, kinda like I would imagine Mars to be. But it was the cheapest of the overpriced options here. The car park, and everywhere else, is occupied by swarms of black flies that lovingly attempt to fly in your nose or ears over and over and over again, despite you swiping at them repeatedly and yelling ‘jesusfuckingchrist!’ as loud as you can, while waving your arms around. Yet still they persist until successfully getting into your mouth.
The heat is stifling here, even right now as I lie in bed it is at least 36C (96.8F), but at least the hum of the power station will help lull us to sleep.
Uluru is found within Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park, and the next day we awoke early again to go to the other half of the park, Kata Tjuta. Ever since our first visit back in 2003, I’ve thought that Kata Tjuta was the equal of Uluru, if not the better of the two red rocks.
It has the same magnetism, but it’s not a giant monolith, so you can walk in and around and get up close to the rocks.
14th October 2019 - Uluru & Kata Tjuta
Today we hiked Kata Tjuta, through the Valley of the Winds. For Katie and I, this was our 3rd time on the trail. It was the boys’ second.
I remember being amazed at the place during our first time, the giant chunks of the red conglomerate stone were like concrete in hell. The curves of the hills made fantastic shapes. Being in the Valley made you feel like you were somewhere special.
I also remember being on some serious dosage of aspirin or something else in order to stay upright and stave off a fever. I was fighting gastro that I picked up at some dodgy hostel in Cairns, a city I hate to this day for making me ill. The drugs got me through the hike but started to wear off by the time we went to the local supermarket. I was struck immediately upon entering the store by the icy nature of the aircon. It had me shivering like I’d just jumped into the beer cooler. After getting down one aisle, I was shaking so badly that I bolted frantically for the door. Of course the icy aircon was only icy because my fever had returned. No one else gave it much thought. Outside, I found a park bench and lay down until Katie came and found me.
Our second time was with 2 yr old Oscar and 5 yr old Henry, seven years after that first visit.
Third time is now, eight years later. Boys are grown, and no one needs to be carried. The 7 kilometre walk previously felt like a monster. Not anymore.
Maybe we should come back in another nine years?
It strikes me now what a surreal experience it was being at Kata Tjuta eight years apart and doing the same hike. The place obviously hadn’t changed - the concrete from hell was still as hellish and wonderful as ever. It has been there for a couple million years, so eight years is nothing but a whisper. But the boys were so different. On the first trip, we’d carried both for most of the distance, and it was a struggle with boys getting hot, tired, crabby. Seven kilometres was a long walk to do with a couple of toddlers. Not this time. Henry walked so fast he had to stop and wait for us to catch up.
I’ve never had such a thing happen, where my mind couldn’t help but jump back and forth between the present and the past, the boys as toddlers, and them as teenagers, in the same backdrop. It makes me happy, and sad all at the same time.
We spent part of the afternoon at the campground pool. If the United Nations had a swimming pool out back, not the nice one where heads of state and other political high rollers sun themselves next to pure crystalline waters, kept perfect by asylum seekers, but the slightly skanky one where the prime minister’s brother-in-law and his kids hang out, that’d be the pool at the Uluru campground.
There’s a Canadian who’s friendly and happy to chat. Chatting with strangers is Katie’s department. There are a handful of 50-something Germans who stay only long enough for efficient cooling. Sitting on the edge of the pool, I heard English, French, Japanese.
We were all very different in backgrounds and circumstances, but all needed respite from the oppressive heat, and were drawn to the murky water of the pool. And for those camping in the dust, which was the majority, it also served as a bit of a rinse off from a dusty and sweaty day spent outside. You might find that gross, and under normal circumstances I would too. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Eating, sleeping, cooking, sharing a toilet block amongst 100 strangers - just plain existing - in the 40 degree heat, and you too would spend your afternoon at the campground pool. The water was cold, and you could tell that the chlorine level was at an appropriate level of eye-burning such that you’d be safe from serious issues after being splashed in the face by passing children.
Besides, we needed something to do once we grew tired of browsing between the air conditioned gift shops, tour offices, the aforementioned icy grocery store, and the pleasantly cool cafe. The cafe was oppressive in its own way, with prices so hefty we were forced to purchase food for the boys from the kids’ menu. We didn’t really force them, more so convinced them that ordering from the kids menu was fine, that surely the portions were good sized. ‘The kids' menu is just like the regular menu, only with apple juice and a few less french fries,’ we told them. In business this is called getting ‘buy in’, which in practical terms means spreading the risk of a decision so that when things go pear shaped, it’s not all your fault.
Convincing the boys to order from the kids’ menu made it partially their idea, thus when the tiny hamburger and 6 french fries arrived, we would say something like, ‘Well, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’. The boys would then try to disavow their involvement in the decision, and we would follow with, ‘Ok, so now we know. Next time we’ll not make the same mistake’, while fully expecting that this incident will be completely forgotten within the next 45 minutes. Short term memory loss is one of the advantages of having teenage boys.
Feel free to use these tactics for yourself.
We did so in this case because cooking in the late afternoon heat is horrible, and because traveling for many months is expensive, thus saving $10 here and there by ordering from the kids’ menu adds up. Anyways, it’s the least the boys can do to contribute.
Money was always in the back of my mind. By the time we arrived at Uluru, we’d been traveling for almost 10 months, and watching our bank account balance dwindling was an unpleasant part of the experience. It drove our decision making, sometimes to an extreme, and things like eating kids’ meals and camping in the overflow parking lot. There were more important things, necessities, that we needed to plan for, like diesel.
Trip plan.
Tomorrow, Uluru to Kings Canyon Resort. 306km all sealed
Kings Canyon to Palm Valley? 214km (can’t tell from map, I think the unknown section is 16km) all unsealed.
Palm Valley to Glen Helen. 134km. 59km unsealed
Glen Helen to Alice - appx. 150km
Total = 804km
Buy 60L of petrol at Curtin Springs
Buy more at Glen Helen, enough to get to Alice
Our two nights at Uluru nearly over, it was important to start planning. In less than a week we would be in Alice Springs, the largest town we would have seen since leaving Mildura two weeks ago. But we were taking the back roads between Uluru and Alice, and taking that route it’s essential to plan for your fuel usage. There is some risk of danger, to be sure, as there are some very remote stretches, but there is also the more important risk of overpaying. Every drop of fuel sold between Uluru and Alice Springs is done so at extortionist rates. So in a perfect world we would roll into Alice Springs with only fumes left in the tank, the boys pushing the car to the pump, fueled themselves by our time spent together amongst the magical rocks, and tiny hamburgers.
The poll is closed, so to me Uluru looks like soap from the distance. And I agree, Kata Tjuta is magical, although for a while there I thought I'm loosing my mind. Odd sensation. Still, would go again!