Ayers Rock from the air

The best part of the flight from Ayers Rock to Sydney was the view of the rock from the air.

Leaving Yulara

Later that evening Alan and I went to dinner at the Outback Pioneer, the kind of budget accommodation of the resort. Dinner there involved buying a cut of the raw meat of your choice at the counter and cooking it yourself on one of the many grills available. I had a big lamb steak as it had been a while since I'd eaten lamb. There was a salad bar there too to accompany your meat with salad, baked potatos and the like.

Entertainment was provided by the old guy on the stage at the front who was played a set of acoustic covers before becoming a DJ. He stuck mostly to classic shady DJ fare like Wham and Abba but the young crowd which filled the small dance floor lapped it up. At one point I got harassed into joining a conga which thankfully fininshed within seconds of me grudgingly getting to my feet.

The next morning I rose a little later than I had intended, jumped into Chops2 and bolted off to try not to miss the sunrise for the second day in a row. Luckily I didn't miss seeing it, although I had to make do with watching it from the car as, again, I made it to the viewing area a little late.

After taking a couple more pictures I headed off to the Mala car park at the base of the rock, this time so that I could do the 9.4km walk around the base of Ayers Rock.

The walk takes you past many interesting features as well as past quite a few sites which are of spiritual importance to the Mala people. There are signs at such sites which tell you not to photograph these areas but, unlike with climbing the rock, fines apply if you are caught ignoring these signs. Often there was very little to see at these sites and so it wasn't really a problem to not take photos.

The walk took almost two hours in total and by the time I was finished the initially cold morning had warmed considerably. I was really getting used to the sunshine again.

After leaving the rock I headed back to Alan's place to pick up my bags and Alan gave me a lift to Connellan Airport in time for my 13:35 flight to Brisbane via Sydney.

See the difference?

Sunset

After a quick stop off at a viewing point for Kata Tjuta, I headed to the sunset viewing area at Ayers Rock. This time I got to see the colour changes in the rock from a much closer vantage point than I had the previous evening. It wasn't easy to tell the colour change at the time as it was so gradual but it was much more obvious looking back at my photos.

Wicked Campers

There's a company over here called Wicked Campers which rents camper vans with cool paint jobs to backpackers. I'd seen a few different vans on my travels but this van with a Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas theme parked at Kata Tjuta was the coolest. You can see some of the other styles available at:

Wicked Campers

The Mystery Machine is another cool one.

I'm not waving, I'm swatting a fly

From the shadows to the light

Down in the valley

The first viewpoint

Valley of the Winds

Kata Tjuta, also known as The Olgas, is a group of 36 dome-shaped peaks around 27kms west of Ayers Rock. You might think that Uluru and Kata Tjuta, the two big rock formations in a sea of flat, red land, would be made of the same rock in the same way, but you'd be wrong. They are made of very different types of rock which gives the rocks at Kata Tjuta a very different character to Ayers Rock. For those of you interested in the geology you can see how they formed at the link below.

Geology bit

The main walk at Kata Tjuta is a 7.4km circuit called The Valley of the Winds which takes you alongside, between and round the back of a large number of the domes. It only took me a couple of hours although I would've been quicker if I hadn't stopped every five minutes to take photos of the amazing landscape. There were dried up rivers, green valleys, flat plains and a whole lot of big rock. It was spectacular and the hot afternoon sun made the walk even more enjoyable.

Back at ground level

The white dashes

The white dashes marked the route from the point where the chain stopped.

Me at the top

Reaching the summit

After taking a few photos from the ledge, drinking a bit of water and getting my breath back I continued the climb.

There was no chain anymore but by now the wind had died down and the slope was nowhere near as steep as before. The route also took me away from the edge. This part was certainly a lot easier and safer than the first.

I got talking to the American guy that I'd been keeping pace with. His name was Steven and he had been climbing on his own since he abandoned his girlfriend who got scared round about the 30m mark. He wasn't even sure if she was still climbing or not but hoped she'd given up as he'd left his bag on the tour bus he had taken out to the rock and it was due to be leaving in ten minutes. He was never going to make it back in time.

We walked together for the rest of the climb, exchanging banter and resting every so often. It didn't take long until we reached the top.

The view was amazing!

It was just flat red land and little green plants in every direction as far as the eye could see.

I made a quick phone call home from the top. It seemed strange that I could get a network up there but I suppose there was a completely uninterrupted line of sight between my position and the mobile network mast back at the resort.

After spending about ten minutes at the top taking in the scenery and taking a few photos we started heading back down. By now Steven had missed his bus but was pretty convinced his girlfriend was on it with his bag.

He seemed a little disappointed when we bumped into her about a quarter of the way down the rock. Obviously she had conquered her fear.

Steven decided to walk back to the top with Catherine as I carried on down.

Walking down was infinitely easier than walking up, even on the steep lower half. It only took about twenty minutes to get from top to bottom although it had taken me over an hour to climb from bottom to top.

Once I was back at ground level I sat on a bench enjoying the now warm sunshine and had a quick bite to eat. The air temperature was now comfortably in the twenties so it was great to be back in the sort of weather I'd been missing for the last few months. I flicked through a leaflet about the Uluru Cultural Centre which was only a couple of miles away so decided to head there next.

Just as I was back in Chops2 and about to reverse out of my parking spot I spotted Steven and Catherine who had finished their descent and were trying to figure out how to get back to the resort. They told me that their bus headed to the cultural centre after it left the rock so I offered them a lift.

The cultural centre wasn't really anything to write home about but it did have a few interesting displays on Anangu stories. All the laws of the indigenous people are contained in stories and myths, many centred around the rock and most containing personified giant talking animals. For every scrape and gouge on Ayers Rock there seemed to be some explanation in a story, probably involving a fight between a giant serpent and a kangaroo or something.

Steven and Catherine's bus didn't seem to be around so after we'd read all the stories and looked at all the art I gave them a lift back to the resort before heading off to Kata Tjuta.

View from halfway up

Barely started

If you view this full size you can better appreciate how steep it was.

View from the car park

Doesn't look too bad, does it?

The lung burner

After taking a few photos I jumped back into Chops2 and headed a bit further round the rock to the Mala car park. This was the car park at the foot of the climb. Since it was sunny but baltic I felt the conditions for climbing were pretty good as I thought the air would heat up quickly in the strong sunshine. I figured that by the time I got to the top it would be pleasant and hoped I could be back at the bottom before the sun got too strong.

I was fairly confident about the climb. There were already a large number of people making their way up the side of the rock and some of those people looked pretty old. I've not stopped walking since I left home so I was sure my legs could take the punishment without too much trouble so I set off.

I deliberately ignored the sign at the bottom of the climb as I had a rough idea what it said. It was placed there by the Anangu, the traditional owners of the rock. I had been told that they would prefer it if people didn't climb the rock although I wasn't sure why. I was slightly concerned that I'd think their reasons were valid hence I decided to climb the rock first and find out the reasons afterwards. If I felt their objections were fair then I could feel guilty later.

I started to climb and the first forty or so metres went fine. The slope was getting ever steeper and I had to scramble the last five metres pretty much on my hands and knees but now I'd reached the part of the climb where there was a chain I could hang on to and use to pull myself up. I was convinced this was going to be fairly straightforward.

It really wasn't.

A big problem was the wind. As I got higher it got stronger and stronger. The morning air had been cold enough at ground level without the added chill of the wind. By now my hands were freezing and the cold metal chain I was using to pull myself up the slope didn't help matters. The wind also meant I had to crouch low to avoid being blown off balance and measure every small step with a great deal of caution. By this point the slope was such that if you started to slide and picked up a little momentum there was very little to stop you until you hit the bottom.

The other problem I facing was my breathing. I couldn't seem to climb for more than ten or fifteen metres before I collapsed in a gasping heap with my lungs burning. Obviously the cold air, wind and altitude would have had a slight bearing on this but to be honest I think it was more an honest reflection of my cardiovascular fitness. The rock was kicking my ass!

By now the strengthening wind was starting to force people to abandon the climb. A large number of people who quite clearly didn't make it to the top were starting to retreat back down and I didn't blame them. My hands were baltic, I could barely breathe and the wind kept threatening to blow me off my feet. I was starting to consider whether or not I should give up too and try again the following morning.

So what made me keep going?

There was this little kid with a family who was climbing behind me. He must've been like ten years old and it didn't look like he was stopping. Hell, it looked like he was gaining on me. I certainly wasn't going to let him overtake me let alone climb higher than I was. Sure his shortness meant that the wind wasn't affecting him quite so much as it was me. He was like a car driving across the Forth Road Bridge on a windy day. I was an HGV. But that was no excuse, he was just a little kid so I kept on climbing.

About five minutes later the little guy and his family seemed to have given up so I needed a new goal. I decided that I'd rest until someone overtook me and then I'd try and keep pace with whoever that was. It seemed like a sensible plan but it failed miserably.

I swear to God that the next guy that passed me was the Six Million Dollar Man. He wasn't even holding the chain and just jogged passed me. It took about twenty seconds of trying to keep up with him before he disappeared into the distance and I was once again reduced to a gasping mess.

After regaining my breath I noticed a guy around my age who was climbing on his own. He'd only passed me during my last stop and he had paused for a breather about ten metres up from me. Since he clearly wasn't superhuman I decided that keeping up with him might be an achieveable goal. I actually overtook him and cleared him by about another ten metres before I had to rest then he leapfrogged me and paused about the same distance in front of me as he had before. This continued all the way up to the ledge about halfway up the rock where the chain stopped.

After resting briefly I realised that the platform I was on allowed me to take in the view of the surrounding area for the first time since I started the climb. It was beautiful.

All that was visible for miles around was the flattest land I'd ever seen and in the distance the sun was shining down on Kata Tjuta, another large rock formation. I was wondering how spectacular the view from the top was going to be.

Chops2 and the rock

Ayers Rock just after sunrise

There's no such thing as idiot-proof

I woke up at around 6.30am on the morning of Tueday 4th July with the sole intention of making it to the sunrise viewing area at Uluru in time for the sunrise which I had been informed would be at about 7.30am. Breakfast was half a rockmelon (I love that stuff) before I headed out into the darkness to get acquainted with Chops2, my ride for the next two days.

Chops2 is my cousin's Ford Explorer which takes its name from his nickname, Chops. The previous evening Alan had said something to the effect of, "It's automatic. Have you driven an automatic before?" I answered that I had once moved my Grandma's automatic from the back of my house to the front so I knew what I was doing. In the back of my mind I was also thinking, "How hard can it be? It's got no clutch and can't stall. It's idiot-proof. Hell, if Americans drive them all the time they can't be that complicated."

So in the cold darkness of the morning I jumped into the drivers seat of Chops2, started the engine and went to reverse out of the parking spot...except I couldn't get the damn thing out of park so went nowhere.

Now, I'm not an idiot. I knew that I had to press the button on the side of the gearstick to move it but for all I pushed that button and pulled the gearstick the damn thing would not move. By this time it was closing in on 7am and I knew I still had to buy petrol and drive for around 15 minutes before I made it to the viewing area so this was a hassle I could've done without. So I did the sensible thing and pulled the driver's manual from the glove compartment and started reading.

How was I supposed to know the stick wouldn't come out of park if I didn't have my foot on the brake? Makes sense now that I think about it but I never had to do that on my Grandma's car.

With that problem solved I reversed onto the road and headed for the petrol station, only briefly getting lost on my way.

Okay so I'd made it to the petrol station. Putting petrol in the car wasn't something I could get wrong, surely.

You'd be surprised.

Pulling up with the wrong side of the car to the pump was easily fixed. That wasn't a big deal. I'd found a pump that dispensed the right fuel, Opal. Opal is a kind of replacement unleaded petrol sold in the Northern Territories in Australia because it only has something like 5% of the fumes of normal unleaded petrol. It was introduced to try and cut down on petrol sniffing in the territory, a problem that is rife, especially in Aboriginal communities.

So all I had to do now was take the off the fuel cap and fill the tank. Except for some reason I couldn't get the fuel cap off. I turned the key, expecting the cap to come away in my hand, but it didn't. I tried twisting it off but it didn't seem to be loosening whichever way I turned it and I certainly didn't want to break the thing. Still wasn't a big deal though, I figured I could just check the manual.

How to get the fuel cap off wasn't in the manual.

By this point it was after 7.10am and I'd been standing by my car in the petrol station without pumping any petrol for more than five minutes clearly looking a bit 'special.'

I double checked the manual, triple checked it and then quadruple checked it just in case I'd missed the information the other three times. It was when I looked that final time that I noticed there was a sort of quick start guide leaflet in the plastic cover the manual was in. Thankfully this leaflet held the information I required so I got the cap off, stuck $40 of petrol in the tank, paid up and started tanking it along the road toward Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park...well within the speed limit of course.

I could've done without having to stop at the park entrance to buy a three day pass for $25 but I don't think it would've made much difference. By the time I made it to the sunrise viewing area it was about 7.35am and the sun had risen high enough that I missed all the colour changes on the rock and by now the rock was fully illuminated. I still took a couple of photos as the rock seemed to get more and more impressive the closer you got.

Sun setting upon the rock

The rock gets redder as the sun starts to set and then slowly gets plunged into shadow.

Me and Uluru

This was a pic from the viewpoint in the resort where I got my first view of Ayers Rock.

Another day, another journey

When I had booked my Greyhound ticket from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock on the internet I was told that I was to get the bus from a bus stop in Alice Springs at 7.30am. However, when I checked into my hostel on the Sunday night one of the guys who worked there said he'd tell them to pick me up at the hostel at 6.45am. I assumed that happened all the time and took him at his word that he'd make the arangements, although I always had some nagging doubts in the back of my mind.

It was no surprise then that by 7.00am on the morning of Monday 3rd July the bus hadn't turned up at the hostel. I asked the girl at reception if she knew what time the bus was due and she told me that she'd never heard of the Greyhound picking people up at the hostel before. She tried to phone Greyhound to confirm that they were indeed picking me up there but the offices weren't open at that time in the morning. She kindly gave me a lift to the bus stop and the bus turned up at around 7.10am, picked up the five of us who were waiting and promptly left. It seemed to me that I could quite easily been left behind that morning.

Anyway, after a short four and a half hour journey I was in Yulara, otherwise known as the Voyages Ayers Rock Resort. The whole resort was built pretty much all at once and includes accommodation from backpacker lodges at the Outback Pioneer all the way through to the five star hotel called the Sails in the Desert. The resort also includes shops, cafes, restaurants, accommodation for the employees, a fire station, police station and a medical centre among many other things.

My cousin Alan met me as I got off the bus. He works for Voyages, the company that owns the resort, and had kindly offered to put me up for the few days I was spending there. I'm not sure how many years it's been since we last saw each other so it was good to see him again. He gave me a brief tour of the place before dropping me off in the centre as he had to get back to his work. I spent most of that afternoon looking around the shops and reading pamphlets from the tourist information place, trying to give myself an idea of what I wanted to try and fit in to my brief stay.

In the early evening I walked up to the viewpoint in the centre of the resort to take in the view and then hung around to watch the sun setting upon the the rock. It certainly felt quite surreal seeing Ayers Rock with my own eyes for the first time.

After the sunset I met up with Alan and his girlfriend and they took me out to dinner at the Sails in the Desert. Obviously I haven't been dining in the restaurants of many five star hotels while I've been away and the fact that it was a buffet was just the icing on the cake. All you can eat! In a five star hotel! Man, it was better than Christmas!

The evening was topped off with a few nice glasses of wine in the hotel bar before we headed back to Alan's place where I promptly KO'd in my bed in preparation for an early start and a long day the following day.

One night in Alice

Sunday night was spent in Alice Springs. After I'd checked into my hostel I headed out for a bit of a wander to see what the place was like. By that point most of the shops were shut so I went to Melanka's, a bar/hostel, where I had myself a nice kangaroo fillet and met up with a group of people from my bus for a music quiz.

The five of us made a pretty good team as we all seemed to have slightly different tastes in music. My speciality seemed to be cheesy rubbish, a reputation that was cemented when I was the only one of the five that recognised Copacabana and knew that Barry Manilow sang it. The girls seemed to have rock and Indie well covered. Our fifth member, Michael, a German, specialised in David Hasselhoff and Right Said Fred.

After an average start and a disastrous third round we managed to salvage third out of around twelve teams so we left happy. After the late night before, and with an early start looming, it was early nights all round so I headed back to my hostel for a good night sleep just as the real party started kicking off in the bar.

Dinky the singing dingo

Journey to the red centre

After we'd finished the mine tour on the Sunday morning we all piled back into the bus and carried on our way up to Alice Springs. We stopped for a quick photo op at the South Australia/Northern Territory border as can be seen above. The photo looks a bit clearer if you view it full screen.

A little later we stopped for lunch then our next stop was to see Dinky the singing dingo. He's a tamed dingo who lives in a roadhouse in NT and sings when people play the piano. He's a bit of a local legend and has made it into National Geographic magazine and more recently Trivial Pursuit. You can read a bit more about him at:
http://www.abc.net.au/central/stories/s820858.htm

After leaving Dinky, having been treated to a quick performance, it was only about another hour before we arrived in Alice Springs early in the evening.

Me and the guys from the bus

The underground hostel

Behind each set of curtains that you can see on the left and right walls were two sets of bunk beds. The tunnel went much deeper than can be seen here, probably around 30m back.

Whole lotta nuthin

The view on the Journey up to Alice Springs looked a lot like this.

Leaving Adelaide

I finally did it! On the morning of Saturday the 1st July I left Adelaide to continue my travels. The first leg of my journey was to be a two day trip up through South Australia and into the Northern Territory to reach Alice Springs. I set off as part of a tour of around 18 people. The majority of the time was spent on the bus with a few stops at roadhouses along the way.

We spent Saturday night in a strange little town in the middle of nowhere called Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy exists for only one reason. Opal. There's a shedload of it under the ground, and the town, with a population of around 3500, is obsessed with the stuff.

When I heard about the place I assumed that the town would be pretty much owned and run by one or two big mining companies. In actual fact I was way off. Basically, the people of Coober Pedy have kept the big companies out of the town since it was built. People in the town mine for themselves. All you have to do is pay a few bucks for a permit and you get given 4 pegs to peg out either a 50m x 50m or 100m x 50m square/rectangle of land. That land is then your "claim" where you can mine for as long as you want provided you mine for a minimum amount of time each week. If you find opal you'll make a decent amount of money. If you don't you waste a decent amount of money.

More about opal and mining can be found at:

http://www.cooberpedy.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=202#e132

Anyway, it was Saturday evening in Coober Pedy and everyone on my bus went out for a few drinks at a local bar. After a few dinks there most people retired to the hostel but a few of us wanted to watch the England vs Portugal match and so set off up the road for a hotel which we'd been told would be screening the game. As we arrived there we found the hotel owners closing up. They said they were too quiet to stay open but they were heading to a social club along a badly lit road and the match might be on there. So we headed off to try and find this social club. We got there just before kick-off.

It was a strange, strange place. It seemed that if you wanted a drink after midnight in Coober Pedy this was the only place to be. This meant that the 20-30 people inside there were of all ages. The old blokes wanting a pint were there, as were the young people wanting a Saturday night out, as were the middle aged women wanting a gossip. Hell, there were people in the corner playing table tennis. I was the only person from my bus to stay and watch the whole game, although I shouldn't have bothered. The club actually shut about 20 minutes before the penalties were over but the kind lady that was closing up allowed me and a couple of old guys to stay to the end.

The old guys clearly didn't have a clue about football. They seemed to think that the game had been entertaining to watch. It was when they claimed that penalties was no way to settle an important match like a quarter final that I felt the need to interject. I know a lot has been made about this point, especially after what happened in the final, but after watching two hours of an uncharacteristically uncreative Portugal and a characteristically mediocre England I was glad of the short but sweet excitement of penalties. They should've scrapped the match and had the penalty shoot out instead. The match took up two hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Anyway, with England out I could return to my hostel, blatantly ignoring the "Don't walk around Coober Pedy at night by yourself" advice our driver Richard had given us all earlier.

So I got back to the hostel and got about three hours of sleep before I had to get up for a mine tour. We were shown a mine, told about how it all works and were told about how easy it is to buy explosives in town. You get them at the local supermarket as if you were buying cigarettes. Obviously I felt tempted to pick some up as a souvenir but the supermarket wouldn't open until after we were back on the road. Shame.

Oh yeah, the hostel was underground. My room was part of one big corridor tunnelled into the side of a rocky hill. It was well cool!

Me and my 'tache

A combination of laziness and high razor prices led me to grow a bit of a beard. When I eventually decided it had to go I first shaved it into this moustache for comedy value (the best reason to do anything). I know it's not a great pic cos there's no light on my face but I look so ridiculous I felt it merited being posted.

Foul play in FIFA

Everybody get a copy of "Foul!" by Andrew Jennings. If the majority of the content of the book is true, and you'd imagine FIFA would sue for libel if it wasn't, then the level of corruption and mismanagement in FIFA is massive. It's a really eye-opening read.