Ayers Rock!
Yeah yeah I'm told it got renamed Uluru.. translated to English though is Ayers Rock, isn't it? I mean last time I was talking to the guys about France no one said La Tour Eiffel, it's the Eiffel Tower! In English!
When did we start naming things in Aboriginal anyway? I can't speak it, who really can, hell, there are that many dialects, even one "tribe" has trouble understanding the other one just down the road. Oh, and don't even get me started on THE OLGAS!! I can't even pronounce Kata Tjuta. Who puts the letter J after the letter T anyway.. geez.
We left Coober Pedy and began one of the most boring drives we've done. It was almost 10 hours, including the usual toilet breaks, from the edge of no where to the middle of no where.
Now, the thing is, while you'd expect this remote place to be pretty quiet, you'd be mistaken.
Driving into Yulara (the "resort" at Ayers Rock) was a shock. We haven't seen so many cars and people in the outback. It was kinda weird having to actually give way at a Give Way sign, let alone looking left and right before driving through. See we almost gave up on bothering to check if anyone was coming when we had to drive through a Give Way sign in the outback. No one was EVER coming. It was a waste of brake pads to slow down and fuel to speed up again (although, not looking and being taken out by a Road Train could have been slightly worse).
The first thing we had to do was get some sunset shots. Little did I know everyone had the same idea.
Like the outback paparazzi, thousands of people flocked to the rusting pebble to capture its colours as the sun began setting over the horizon behind us. Some with champagne, some with cigars, and some sitting on the roof of their cars (hired cars of course) but all with the cameras pointed in one single direction. With hundreds of cars and thousands of people in over-priced tour buses, the whinging celebrities have nothing to complain about when it comes to having a camera shoved in your face.
Now, for some reason, I thought I was going to get a photo of this rock that no one has ever seen before. Some how my Canon with L series lens was going to capture something unique, something magical, something Uluru.
Alas, my pic looks like the millions of pictures out there. Yep, it's an orange rock with greenish ground and blue ski. Wow!
Everyone knows it's big, but when you are there, with no buildings to compare, you forget how big it is. An information plaque in the town says it's higher than La Tour Eiffel... that's the Eiffel Tower for all you uncultured ones reading this that don't know it's correct name.
Next stop The Olgas. Gee I love looking at rocks.
Let me just say this; if you were a culture that believed in giant rainbow serpents, surely there would be giant humans too, and with no giant bathrooms, well surely you'd expect some evidence of their existence right?
Yep.
So, Kata Tjuta is Aboriginal for "I'm busting to go, and I'm too far from my bean stalk so I'll have to go here".
We spent a couple of days wandering around in the heat. It's ok, because we are tough now. Forty degrees is nothing for us. In three months we've had one day of rainy cold weather. We were hardened aussies now.... well as long as we reached our air conditioned F250 with it's glorious air conditioned seats before we could finish a 500ml bottle of water.
Talking about our hardened selves, we decided to skip Kings Canyon and Alice Springs and begin our trip home. It was just far too hot to stay. At 7am it would be 24C, by 9am 36C and within an hour 40C (in the shade). It literally takes your breath away. If you move from the shade, the heat radiating off the dry dusting ground seems to get amplified and you feel like a cheap Sunday roast. We'll have to come back when it's cooler, maybe when there is a little grass too. Oh, a nice ocean breeze and maybe a good river and lake for the jetski would be nice too. I'll be here 100% then!
So we're not as tough as we thought we were, but we know someone who is...
Mad Max!
Yep, Silverton, home of Mad Max 2.
This dusty, almost ghost town, is home to the Mad Max museum.
The owner, Adrian, from northern England has collected some of the most sought after items. Ever wondered where the steel boomerang that was thrown by the feral kid went? You guessed it, here! What about the little music box that Max gave the boy (after taking it from the dead truck drivers hand). Yep, here. Oh, even the dead truck driver is here.
What about the buggies and stuff?
And of course, no collection would be complete without a couple of fantastically built replicas of Max's car.
So without further ado, I give you the highlight of this trip. The pinnacle, unlike other Pinnacles, the Great, without the Barrier Reef, the most aggressive, without the crocs, the most awesome man made structure south of the equator.
Unfortunately, this marks the end of this amazing trip. Like a kid waiting for Christmas, we're only one sleep away from home.
We've had some serious fun. We've had some laughs, we've had a few arguments (although I've won most), but most of all, the amazing things we've seen, the places that really make Australia the place to be. The heart and soul of this country.
Forget Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, they are just the hands and feet that carry and allow the not-so-tough to survive in this amazing country (including me).
It's out here that you see the Aussies. It's here that you get a hello off a complete stranger and it's out here that people wave to you from the car traveling a hundred kilometres an hour in the opposite direction. It's a smile from the local shop owner, to the genuinely interesting people that come up and have a chat.
Sure, it's not as polished, but the rough "Aow-ya-gowin mate" is at least the kind of greeting where you know the person asking it really does want to know.
So yeah, I'm kinda sad to be returning, but I realise I need the motherly bosom the big city gives me. I'll deal with being cut-off while I'm driving home from work. I'll deal with people beeping if I stop at a give way for too long, I'll deal with the feeling of being woken from a daydream, while waiting in a line at the bank, when the teller yells out NEXT.
But I'll be happy to fill up with some cheap fuel, get anything I want from the shops, that are 5 minutes up the road, but most off all, drop my jetski in at the nearest boat ramp and jetski over to a nice grassy place to drink a flat-white with my mates.
I love Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment