OZ9/6: Uluru & King's Canyon, Australia's Big Ticket Landmarks

We drove as long as the sunlight held out, but since dusk was the easiest time to hit kangaroos in Australia, we stopped and cooked dinner in the sinking sun.

After it was dark, we drove a little longer until we found the rest area serving travelers crossing the line from South Australia to the Northern Territory.  We found a spot, had another fire, and went to bed.  The other three slept outside under the stars around the campfire, which was beautiful, but I think exceedingly cold.  While our sleeping bags may have withstood the cold just fine, I didn’t want to sleep near the fire because I dodn’t want my gorgeous little sleeping bag to take any sparks in the night and have holes melted by morning.  So we slept soundly in the tent.

In the morning we made breakfast.  Where the other three were using the fire to slowly cook their breakfasts, our routine had whittled down to a very simple process: boil water in a matter of a couple of minutes in the JetBoil, meanwhile putting rolled oats, brown sugar, apple bits, raisins, peanuts, peanut butter and/or cinnamon in our mess kits.  Then we put the boiled water in the oatmeal, sealed the lids and let it sit, use any leftover hot water for tea or coffee, pack up the JetBoil (which only needed dried because it had only been used to boil water), and then enjoy the breakfast.  It was handy.

So we finished eating and cleaning up before the other three, not to mention we had our tent packed up way ahead of them because it is so simple to put up and take down.  So I went out into the bushes and collected garbage, which had been sort of my thing recently.  I saw a lot of comments on WikiCamps about how free campers should be good stewards and not leave garbage and I agreed.  I thought that if we were staying in a place for free, we could repay the sit by collecting garbage that someone had irresponsibly left.  And there was a lot of it here.

Today was the day we would reach Uluru!  We were excited, as this was one of the few landmarks Australia is known for.  We had to go out of the way to see it, but it was a must-do.

Gwen was driving today and freaking us all out by slowing down and moving way over when oncoming cars passed her.  Joe made the effort to confront her about this and I think he actually did really well.  It was a difficult thing to do delicately and I was really proud of how he handled it.  It ended up that she just wasn’t used to driving a car so big with such a big gear system.  She was accustomed to her little car with compact edges and tight gears, so instead of learning how big the car was, she just endangered our lives by swerving dangerously close to all the way off the road!  Joe was able to logically talk her through it and get her to practice knowing where the edges of the car were, how much distance she needed, and how to remain as much on a straight line as possible.  Her slowing down and speeding up while passing cars, as well as not using the cruise control was killing our gas mileage and it was driving the rest of us totally nuts.  So it was so good of Joe to make such a kind effort.

We were faked out at first by what we thought was Uluru but instead turned out to be a less-impressive but similar formation.  We kept going and found Uluru, but we were deterred at the entrance to the park where it was by an entrance fee of $25 per person!  It seemed like a lot at the time.  We turned around and hemmed and hawed.  We found a gas station and after cowardly trying to get someone else to go talk to one of the workers, I realized I should do it.

I entered the gas station and saw an employee stocking shelves.  I told her our story, that we were poor and it seemed like a huge amount of money and wondered if it really was worth it.  Her answer?  Yes, and if we still didn’t feel like we could afford it, she offered to lend her car to us with the year-round pass associated with it.

I went back and reported to the others.  It was tempting to ask to take her car, but I knew that would just be weird, so I suggested we just deal with it and pay the entrance fee.  We did and drove towards Uluru.

At first it was like, okay, it’s just a rock.  But as we got closer we realized just how massive it was and that it really was just one, single rock.  It is the largest monolith in the world.  Our jaws dropped when we were right alongside it.  It was so surprisingly awe-inspiring.

The lady at the gas station had also asked me if we had planned to climb Uluru.  I knew that it was a touchy subject and so I answered that I had heard it was discouraged because it was a sacred site.  To which she responded, listen, don’t tell anyone I said this, but you NEED to climb it.  We needed to enter the park and we needed to climb the thing.

Which turns out to be way easier said than done.  The climb is almost straight up.  It is strange to me that Aboriginals don’t want it to be climbed, yet the park service has left the posts and chains up that help climbers to have something to hold on to.  There are some very strange, slightly disrespectful practices going on all over Australia from our experience.

The KILLER climb

There we are, just hanging on to a chain for our lives

At the end of the day I felt very, very guilty for having climbed.  There was a sign just before the path up where the posts and chains were that explained the cultural significance of the monolith.  I had neither noticed the sign nor knew enough about the place to know not to climb up.  I’m sorry that I disrespected a hotly-debated sacred site for the Aboriginals.

At the same time, the lady in the gas station was right.  You can’t NOT climb it.  Our experience of Uluru would have been much less awe-inspiring without climbing it.  The way up was so intense that it really put the size of the thing in perspective.  It was straight up and lasted a LONG time.  Again, I was not in the best shape ever, but I was at least reasonably capable, but I had to stop maybe four or more times to breathe deep, since the sharp intakes of breath were ripping at my lungs like serrated knives.

At the end of the chain, I thought, oh thank goodness, it’s nearly over.  Nope.  A man coming down and said, oh, you’re maybe a quarter of the way there.  I was like, ha, you’re funny.  Turns out he was serious.  Fortunately, that first quarter was the very hardest bit of it, so we were at least three-quarters of the way up by measurement of effort.

I made it to the top first, which I felt I had to do because I could tell that Jojje was gunning for it in an I-must-win sort of way.  I sneakily got ahead of him and just kept at it, slow and steady.

 

Selfie at the top!

The top was amazing, like waves of ultra-hard sandstone, but all of it was just one big rock.  We took some photos and headed back down slowly.

 

We have conquered!

We felt like gangsters

 We made it to the ground glad to have escaped the perils of falling down during the descent.  We got in the car and headed to the car park where the best view of Uluru at sunset was.  Part of the magic of Uluru was to see it change to many colors at dusk.  It was beautiful.

Uluru at dusk

We camped that night outside of the park a few kilometers.  We planned to head back in the next day, since our passes were good for a few days and we wanted to walk around Uluru, as well as check out the Olgas formations, which looked like a citadel of tall and skinny Ulurus.

Our campsite was off the road and we were very glad to have 4wd once we found the sandy bits.  We were exhausted and ready to go to bed, but of course Marco thought we needed a fire.  We discovered something awesome—the spinifex that grows everywhere around that part of Australia was extremely flammable and it was fun to grab bunches of it, throw it on the fire, and watch the flames rise to six or eight feet tall!  It burned out pretty fast and we knew we needed to be a bit careful not to start anything else on fire, as it would have torched the whole place, but it was fun.

Our plan was to get up for sunrise.  We were veeeeeeery sluggish at that hour, but Joe and I were able to motivate everyone to go up the hill.  Joe and Jojje realized they should have brought their cameras, so they decided to race down and get them, which was hilarious to watch, because they simply BOUNDED over obstacles, like Mario jumping over turtles.

Bush-burning at sunrise

It was so cold that morning watching the sun rise.  We looked around and saw a few isolated bushes of the spinifex, so we decided to warm up with a burning bush!  We lit a bush on fire and loved to see it flame up for a while and then go out, so on to the next.  We had a fire dance.

We packed up our camp and went into the park again, first going to the visitor’s center to learn about the area.  This was nice because it put things into context.  Then we headed off to Uluru again, this time to walk around it, which took most of the day.  The path around was nice, but the climb up was the better of the two.  I was also a little cranky at this point, so I made myself a little irritable and isolated.  Stupid, stupid Emily.

After the long walk around the thing, we headed over to the Olgas, which were actually really neat.  The gas station lady who had been so positively influential to us so far had said that we needed to do the Valley of the Winds.  But as we approached the two rock climbers took command of the party and we stopped at a ravine BEFORE Valley of the Winds because they NEEDED rock.  Again, I was irritable, so I was feeling things a little too hard.

It was a lovely little ravine

 So we walked up this little ravine in the last of the daylight and we wouldn’t get to see Valley of the Winds as instructed, but oh well.  This was really amazing rock formations too.  I sort of lagged behind and took it easy, but Joe felt like he had to stay with me, which meant that they went off without us for quite a while, ending up doing a whole huge photo shoot of the three of them.

When they came back down, we headed to Valley of the Winds, but we wouldn’t make it very far as the light was fading.  We hiked back to the car and headed off, making it to a lookout just in time to see the twilight behind the Olgas, making for a gorgeous group shot.

Team Sloth/Inferno in the twilight of the Olgas

A night shot of the skyline

Our next stop was King’s Canyon, where Jojje hoped to meet up with some friends.  We found a campsite near where we thought they were.  It was near here that we saw a sign about a quarantine of mad cow disease and had Marco’s awesome and genuine line of, “Well that’s a stupid sign because cows can’t even read it.”

We camped, had a fire, cooked some dinner and went to bed.  The next morning when we woke up, Jojje unloaded a few things and then took the car to go looking for his friends.  Sadly he couldn’t contact them because he had no phone and we had no data service for him to send them a message on facebook.  He was unsuccessful.

While he was gone though, I realized we had plenty of time before he would be back and rearing to go, so I tried something I had been thinking about doing for a few days: I cooked beans, soup mix, onions, and potatoes in one pot for a long time over mild heat in the fire.  It fit conveniently in our mess kits and would make an AMAZING lunch for us that would be super filling.

When Jojje came back, we packed up and took off to King’s Canyon.  We did a hike around the rim and while the canyon was a lot smaller than we were expecting, it was pretty cool.  The rock formations were rugged and brightly colored.  We got down to a pond where we sat and ate a little snack.  After a while I started doing some stretches and yoga, but it wasn’t until Gwen started doing the yoga that anyone noticed and then they all followed her.  Again, there is really nothing wrong with her being good at yoga—my mind was not well at this time of the month and so it stupidly irked me that SHE was the yoga master.

Marco and I sitting on the edge of oblivion

Down in the canyon

Panorama of the gorgeous view

On edge! A recurring theme of mine.

On the way back to Stewart Highway, we took a road that had a sign that said 4WD ONLY!  We thought it was probably over-blowing the whole idea, but it turned out that, yeah, it was pretty bad.  There were soft sandy stretches mixed with endless, endless washboard, or corrugation as they call it in Australia.  It was two hours of constant jolting of the spine.  I was driving and I sort of enjoyed the challenge.  The sand drifts were a lot like snow drifts back home.

About halfway through this road from hell, we looked up to see camels!  We had heard many times that we would see loads of camels on our journey, but these three guys ended up being the only ones we would see the whole time.  They were just inside of a cattle-guard in a nature preserve area, so we were wondering if they were not truly wild.  Sadly, before we could get very many photos of them, Marco took off running after them like a madman with his GoPro on a stick.  He chased them away.  Punk.

Our friend camel is being very disrespectful with that tongue

We finally got off that terrible road and back on the highway.  Everyone congratulated me for good driving, which actually felt really nice.  We drove until we were just out of Alice Springs, at which point we found a camp site off the road a ways, where there were again many campers.  There were so many that it was hard to find an isolated spot.  The spot we chose was within 50 yards of a campfire with many people around it, who were signing and laughing and playing guitar.  It looked like fun.

We built the standard campfire and Marco asked if he could sleep in the car because he had been getting so cold at night.  And this night was especially cold even before we got in bed.  Marco turned the car on for a little while to heat it up and then went to sleep inside, hoping he would be warm enough.

Even with our really good sleeping bags, liners, and an extra layer of clothing on, Joe and I got cold in the night.  We easily were the warmest, too.  I can’t imagine how cold it must have been for the others.  In the morning our water bottles that we had left out on the table were frozen solid and the tent had ice on the inside.