david taus

Uluru

I’m currently sitting in the Railway Square YHA in Sydney, the first place I set my big backpack down in this country. Tomorrow I leave Australia, but my net movement at this point is practically 0. I’ve come full circle.

I don’t miss Sydney, or big cities for that matter. This morning I woke up in my tent in the Australian outback, at a roadhouse about 250 km outside Alice Springs. It’s big out there, and besides some select nights in the North woods of Wisconsin, the night sky was among the best I’ve ever seen. At points the only light source for 50 miles in any direction was my headlamp. I even became accustomed to the once strange configuration of stars that grace the southern hemisphere. I can recognize the Southern Cross and that’s about it. (How many can pick out more than the Big Dipper?)

The past three days has been spent in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, home to what whitey calls Ayers Rock. I did it in a rental car driven on the wrong side of the road, and I managed to find Jentz and Christian, two German students who came along for the ride. I dragged them behind me, more like. They were into seeing the rock and doing the National Park thing, but had no love for sleeping in tents, cooking food, or walking long distances in the desert. All of which are fairly prevalent in a trip out to Uluru. Luckily we picked up a fourth once we were out there: Jenny (or Janet?) from Sydney, now working as a youth worker on an aboriginal reservation 600 km west of Uluru. More precisely in the middle of nowhere than even Uluru.

It felt good to be driving, although the stereo in the car did not meet my music dorque specifications. And although they didn’t say anything, I could tell the Germans were not down with my musical selections. Christian had a two hour window to be an iPod DJ and really pushed musical boundaries with techno remixes of little-known 80’s pop groups (Boy Meets Girl, anyone?) and more mainstream stuff like Roxette and Dido. They surely couldn’t discuss the effect of a switch in Phish’s 1999 stage setup and its effect on type II jamming style like some Germans I know. But because my name was on the dotted line, I carried the keys and had my finger on the button. The whole expedition had that vibe: this was my trip, and they were along for the ride. Jenny/Janet was hitching so she had the liberty to jump off whenever she wanted.

Four and a half hours of driving through the outback gets you to the park from Alice Springs. On the way there are precisely 5 roadhouses and nothing else built by humans. The land is beautiful, though; it had more trees than I thought it would. but that’s all you see: trees. And scrub brush. And red dirt. And then, finally: a really big rock.

Uluru is really, really big. Larger than life big. But you expected that. You’ve seen so many pictures of the thing that you probably expected it to be bigger than it really is. I did, at least. But it is an impressive sight. Catching a glimpse of the thing on the horizon gives you a little start, partially because it is so big but also because you are seeing something you’ve seen pictures of for so long. Like when you see the Empire State Building or the Mona Lisa for the first time in person. You think: “oh, that’s it.” And that is it. Uluru. A big rock in the middle of the desert.

Were it only a big rock in the middle of the desert, the trip would have been arguably for very little. But the magic of the thing to me was that the entire park was run by the aborigines, the traditional land owners, and everything about the rock was steeped in their mythology. Being an outsider we didn’t get to learn about the juicy details of the thing, but we got enough about it to understand that the thing’s significance is not just that it is big and sticks awkwardly out from its surroundings. It is the physical reminder of the creation time to these people, and its many faces and facets are relics from a more magic time when gods and people coexisted. It is the source of and subject of many of the aboriginal people’s stories and mythology and is involved in many of their life events and rites of passage. It is, i think, a symbol for how they believe people can and should live their life: steadfast, patient, quiet in its beauty. Those people out there are some of Earth’s greatest survivors, and so is that big rock.

Nowhere in the entire park was there anything about geology, natural history, or anything else related to Western science. It was all aboriginal lore and custom. I think the point was lost on my travelling companions. They were just hellbent on climbing the thing. I didn’t climb because the aborigines wished that we wouldn’t. Nor did I take photos of certain parts of the rock as the aborigines wanted them to remain unphotographed. But it’s amazing that so many people did climb the thing and snap pictures. Matt said that they didn’t close the climb because someone figured out that climbing Uluru accounts for as much as 10% of the whole country’s tourism and the white government made the aborigines leave it open because of this reason.

About 45 km to the west of Uluru is Kata Tjuta, a formation of smaller (but still massive) rocks that are much less known but in their own way much more magnificient. The hiking trail takes you through the middle of the formations and because of this you really feel a part of the thing. So in its own way it’s even greater than Uluru despite less press. There are also some points of significance relating Kata Tjuta and male rites of passage so there are a lot of young guys boldly hiking around there, snapping photos of themselves, and the like. The trail itself, called “Valley of the Winds,” is beautiful. The Germans complained about the few dozen feet of elevation change.

Besides the hike up Uluru, there is a 10 km trail around its base. This was my trail. This was, I decided, the last thing I had to do before leaving Australia. I wanted to see every facet of the rock from every angle. I wanted to closely examine this geological anomaly, this source of story and law for the Aborigines, this well-recognized reason for why I came to Australia in the first place. Thanks to mom I have a picture of me as an 8 year old dressed as a swagman and holding a picture of Uluru. Now, almost 20 years later, I have a picture of me dressed in the same clothes I’ve been wearing for a month at Uluru itself.

I walked around the big rock. It took close to 3 1/2 hours. But I guess it’s ok for me to go now. I shuttled the Germans back to Alice Springs. I hopped a plane for Sydney. I’m back to where I started. I didn’t do everything I wanted to do but I accomplished all my goals here. I’m ready to leave this place.

I’m exhausted.

Hawaii tomorrow. I get a day back in the process of getting there, which is interesting. Hawaii has been the not-thought-about encore to this trip which has the potential to be equally as spectacular. I haven’t thought about it a bit, but now that it becomes my present reality I’m getting excited. Which is, AJM would tell me, my first mistake. Stop #1 upon arrival: gear store. The Germans managed to misplace my pot handle tool and the Australians took my empty fuel bottle at the airport. Bastards. The fuel bottle is a necessary; travelling backcountry without a stove and heat source is not advisable. The pot handle would be really nice to have. My weapons: I will need them. Technology allowed us to move us away from aboriginal ways of life and enjoy a sedentary lifestyle, but technology also allows us to move back to nomadism. The contents of the backpack I’ve packed and unpacked for a month now has shelter, warmth, fire, water, food, and basic tools. Everything one could need.

So just like that the month of July is over. And once again July was legendary. August will hold adventures of its own in new and strange places. Now that I’ve been to Uluru and seen the rock in the Red Center, I’m ready to move on.

Posted by davidtaus at August 3, 2005 08:46 AM | TrackBack