Wondering in Alice Land

The adventure began as we headed into Australia’s red backyard; the Northern Territory. We’ll be touring, bussing, and camping out here for eight days in total. We’ve completed a loop from Alice Springs to Uluru and back and saw heaps of massive red rocks scattered in totally random places throughout the flat red desert.

Alice Springs. A culture shock in a country I’ve been living in for the past five months. A city small town/neighbourhood full of stores selling Aboriginal artwork, souvenirs, and very over-priced alcohol. We’ve learned that Australian history is not so different from Canada’s. Aboriginal tribes and cultures once occupied the land at peace with each other and the land until rude white European settlers invading, killed a bunch of them and took over the land for themselves, segregating, discriminating and isolating them… and they still aren’t pleased about it. Scattered throughout the Northern Territory different Aboriginal tribes are concentrated and there is a large Aboriginal population in Alice Springs.

We spent a day here before we hopped on a bus for a three day tour to Uluru and back.

Its not difficult to see how “The Red Centre” gets it's name. Its big, and red, and in the middle of the country. We DID find it difficult to see why they call it a desert though… since it was cold and rained every day of the three days we spent on our trip there… disregard the fact that the sky is grey and we are wearing the same clothes in all the pictures… this loop took three days, I SWEAR!

So Uluru… one BIG friggen rock in the middle of nowhere. Its actually so big, its quite unbelievable. Here’s another shout out to Joe from “My First Amazing World Explorer” for teaching me all I need to know about travelling the world and making this attraction second on my list of things I knew about Australia, after the Sydney Opera House. Its 384m tall, 11.6 km around the base, and I reckon that it was placed there by Aliens. Its also known as Ayers Rock for those of you who are less educated in the Australian Aboriginal language that we’ve come to find contains an absurd amount of the letters “u” and “o” in every word. We checked out a few stretches here and there along with some ancient Aboriginal wall art, a classroom, and kitchen equipped with an emu cutting board.. but we didn’t end up walking around the entire base because we had to make it to the look-out in time to see the sunset… which was nothing short of spectacular, obviously.

Yeah… that was the sunset… But no worries, the sunrise was MUCH better:

Day two consisted of an early morning to see the sunrise over Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Kata Tjuta which means “many heads” is another extremely large red rock-scape plopped in the middle of nowhere that is also known as “The Olgas”. The name is quite self-explanatory seeing as though there are many large rocks that are big and rounded… just like heads. We did a nice 7km walk through the Valley of the Winds and found that Uluru takes way too much credit and people don’t ever hear about Kata Tjuta until they take sign up for a tour to see Uluru, but in my opinion Kata Tjuta has it beat!

The final day was yet another early morning inclusive of a climb up “Heart-Attack Hill” (which mum survived) to get to the top of Kings Canyon in time to see another sunrise… as usual, it followed the trend by being nothing short of spectacular…

After doing this 7km walk around the rim of Kings Canyon we were starting to feel a little underwhelmed by Uluru and were pleased that the tour doesn’t save it for last because they really nailed the “save the best for last” thing by leaving Kings Canyon until the end! Boy, oh, boy, was it spectacular or what! Along our walk we also walked through the Garden of Eden where we ate some wild figs off of a tree and stopped to snack on some apples.

So maybe we didn’t get to experience the sunset and/or sunrise over Uluru, the amazing night sky untainted by light pollution or the hot, dry desert climate but, hey! How many people get to experience three consecutive days of rain in a desert!? Not many… because it rarely happens. Win.

We also got to meet a great group of people who we’ll hopefully get another opportunity to see at some point down the road!

Hittin’ the frog and toad tomorrow morning. Stuart Highway here we come! See yah in 1500km, Darwin.

Sincerely,

AUS