Uluru - Kata Tjuta

On our first afternoon, after a very long delay at the airport clearing the Covid-19 security checks, we picked up the car; checked in at the 'Lost Camel'; purchased our park entry passes; and set off to circumnavigate the rock in the car.

We discovered the ring road around Uluru has a gap of around a kilometre that requires a ten kilometre diversion to complete, what would otherwise be, an eleven kilometre circle.

Uluru ring road

The countryside is quite flat, particularly around the rock, but this diversion in the road runs out to the sunset viewing hillock so we stopped there with hundreds of others and waited for the magical moment.

Uluru Sunset

The following day, after a leisurely breakfast, we had a look around the resort, admiring the wildflowers.

Sturt's Desert Pea and Uluru seen from the Resort

After lunch we drove over to Kata Tjuta - once called 'The Olgas'.

 
Kata Tjuta - The Olgas

Here we decided to explore Walpa Gorge, advertised on line as: 'a 2.6-kilometer trail between sandstone domes with a seasonal stream & wallabies'. We saw the stream but no wallabies - probably, very sensibly, avoiding a throng of recently arrived bus tourists. But the flowers were spectacular in places and it was a good bracing, if not athletic, walk.

Kata Tjuta - The Olgas - walk

That night we had bookings for the Field of Light Experience: 'in the remote desert location with majestic views of Uluru'. The Field of Light is an art installation by English artist Bruce Munro, with, it is said (I didn't count them) more than 50,000 stems crowned with frosted-glass spheres, illuminated by solar-powered variously coloured light emitting diodes (LED's) like thousands of solar path lights. The installation opened 1 April 2016 for a limited time but became so popular with the tourist industry that it is still here.

 
Field of light

After watching another sunset over Uluru, complete with the serendipitous rainbow seen above, we consumed a box of canapés; and got smashed on seemingly bottomless glasses of quite good bubbly (transport, to and fro, is by coach). We were led, some of us stumbling, like an Irishman on Paddy's Day, down the hill into the maze of paths winding through the light field and challenged to find our way out the other side.

Uluru and the Field of light

No worries mate! Back in time for tea.

The following day Wendy and I set out to circumnavigate the rock, clockwise, on foot. Craig and Sonia opted for a shorter walk and then a coffee at the Cultural Centre while they waited for our return. In the end it was we who had to wait for the car to get back (no mobile phone coverage) as we had overestimated how long it would take.

Around the rugged rock the ragged rascal... walked

One has three options: walking unguided; a guided Segway tour; or to hire a bicycle. We only saw two Segway groups, both between the car parks on the southern side. In the sand they are not a lot faster than an easy jog.

 
A little way into our walk and Kata Tjuta - The Olgas - came into view on the horizon
That would be another good walk but - according to Google Maps - ten hours away on foot

A short stretch is quite unpleasant, along the roadside. If I was doing it again a bicycle is definitely the way to go. Yet we were only overtaken by bikes once. There were however, several small groups on bikes coming towards us, travelling anti-clockwise, and we past just one group of walkers going our way, a slow family group with small children, quite a challenge.

Nominally the circumference is about nine kilometres. Some of the track runs close to or adjacent to the face although around the back (the north side) the track runs three to four hundred metres distant. This track does not diverge into Kantju Gorge. To go to the water hole at the tip there's a half a kilometre track branching off the encircling track.

Kantju Gorge - judging by the watermark the waterhole was a bit short of full

After I diverted to Kantju Gorge, Wendy went on ahead and I caught her up quite a bit later, so for many kilometres we each walked alone. At one stage I became concerned that there was no mobile phone coverage so, for example, if my heart valve had played up there was no another soul around and only two very distant emergency medical stations (a defibrillator and emergency radio).

Further around Uluru

But everything was fine. And, although my back was black with them, there were no flies on Wendy.

There were no flies on Wendy

When we reached our starting point, my phone said I'd walked just under twelve kilometres - as I said it's flat all the way. Wendy had timed it. It took us two hours and ten minutes.

At one time it was possible to climb Ayres Rock (as it was known back then). For most of its circumference the face is sheer and this looks to be impossible without climbing ropes and pitons. But as the track rounds the western tip there's a spur running down from the top that provides a natural ramp up. This was finally closed in 2019 precipitating a rush of people getting in/up before the ban.

No climbing anymore

According to the media at the time: an estimated 37 people died on Uluru since Western tourists began climbing the site in the middle of last century, via a track so steep in parts that some scared visitors descend backward or on all fours. Some slipped on wet rock and fell to their death. Others, often unfit or elderly, suffered heart attacks from the strenuous walk and high temperatures.

Today there are numerous requests to respect the religious beliefs of the local Anangu people, who regard the rock as a sacred site. These include refraining from photographing certain features. So, watch out Google Earth.

Similar requests apply to St Paul's in London but not to Westminster Abbey, go figure. These various religious spirits are amazingly capricious when it comes to reflected, refracted or penetrating photons; yet only at certain wavelengths. I suppose that's why there was no mobile phone coverage?

Back at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre and Museum one can buy a wide variety of cultural artefacts and a cynic (not me of course) might feel that this is all part of the creation of a tourism motivated sense of religious mystery about what is, after all, just an unusual geographic feature, that pre-dates the first humans by many tens of millions of years.

 
Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre

On our third evening we were booked to have a Sounds of Silence Dinner: 'under the amazing outback sky while a story teller tells magical stories and tales'. Again, the evening began with a box of assorted canapés with copious wine, beer, and non-alcoholic drinks for those who wanted to avoid falling down. The location was out in the desert at a point not quite equidistant from Uluru and Kata Tjuta, about a quarter of an hour in the bus.

The buffet style dinner provided several courses of: 'delicious Australian delicacies'. And it wasn't too bad!

Kata Tjuta - The Olgas sunset and the Sounds of Silence Dinner

The 'magical tales' turned out to be a passing reference to Aboriginal beliefs, followed by a current astronomical dissertation by an astronomer on the age and scale of the universe, illustrated by how long those photons had been travelling before entering our eyes and thus how far into the past we were looking.

Those of us who had not been in the Cubs or Brownies; had a defective school education; or a bad memory; also learnt how to find the South Celestial Pole. There were several telescopes to look into the past with. Identified in particular was the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It consists of approximately 10 billion solar masses, so that it looks like a faint cloud or perhaps a puff of talcum powder, and out here was clearly visible to the naked eye. This can no longer be seen from our cities and towns, due to street lights and traffic smog:

"And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
                                ... spreads its foulness over all"

It's 160,000 light-years away. Thus, we were seeing the cloud as it was 160,000 years ago, around the time when Homo-sapiens-sapiens,  modern human beings, evolved from earlier humans.

As we ate, we watched Venus set and when the lights went out the Milky Way, the visible stars towards the centre of our galaxy, was spread overhead like an enormous splash of silver paint, that I remember from childhood but can no longer see from Sydney. Magical indeed! 

And yet our telescopes can now see tens of billions of galaxies in the seemingly infinite space beyond. The light from the farthest has taken billions of years to reach us. Galaxy GN-z11 presently holds the record at 13.4 billion light-years from us. So, when the light our telescopes are now seeing left that galaxy, our sun and its solar system did not exist. The planet Earth would not form from a dust cloud for another nine billion years. 

As many have noted when our radio and television signals, travelling at the speed of light, reach Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbour, 2.4 million years from now, it's very likely that Homo-sapiens-sapiens will have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. This becomes a certainty before our signals reach more distant galaxies as our planet will no longer exist.

Thus, looking up, the Earth and all our history, hopes and worries were instantly reduced to cosmic insignificance.

So, my thoughts returned, to Clancy out here droving:

"And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

Again, we were bussed back - no need for a designated driver.