An adventure in “The Outback”

(The Outback, Australia, 13th of February 2017)

We were picked up by our adventure bus at 5.30 in the morning. In the bus sat a Dutch couple and a girl from Wales. The rest of the participants, 12 people, would be picked up at the airport at Uluru five hours later. Our guide Josh was a young man with curly hair and a mustache which matched the image I had of the archetype of a young Australian man. He was energetic and happy and really made us feel that this would be a good trip.

We stopped a few times along the way for toilet visits but also so we could buy beer before the upcoming evenings.

The great happening this morning was a meteor which flew past the bus window and we managed to get a picture of it.

We went to pick up the rest of the group in Uluru at noon and we got some baguettes to eat for lunch while we waited for everyone to show up.

When we were all gathered, we drove to an exhibition where we learned about some of the life stories of the Aboriginals, many of which are about Uluru. Many of the marks and formations that you can see on Uluru have a story behind them, and many of them are very unlikely as they would have meant that the characters in the stories were of great size. Then we went off to Uluru, or Ayers rock as it is also called.

V

We went for a walk along about half the big stone, and we watched the murals and different places belonging to the women and men of the Aboriginals. Along with some parts of the stretch, photography was forbidden since the aborigines are afraid that a image of a holy place of women should reach men and vice versa. A bit odd according to our way of looking at the world but of course we respected their wishes. There is a place at Uluru where you can climb the stone, but as the Aborigines look at Uluru as a sacred place they do not want anybody to climb it. No one in our group did this.

Uluru is really impressive in size and also a fascinating geological phenomena. In a world where everything else is flat, there are a number of large stones placed , besides Uluru there are among others also Kings Canyon and Kata Tjuta.

For dinner we had chicken, vegetables and rice that Josh cooked on his gas cooker in the trailer behind our bus. The bus was parked in a parking lot near Uluru and we sat on the ground and ate our dinner while watching the sunset.

In the meantime, we had great fun looking at senior citizens who poured out of the big and slightly more luxurious buses, and were provided with wine from tables with white tablecloths and their own folding chairs. We decided that we did not want to change places with them.

Flies is an exciting phenomenon in these parts of Australia. For some reason, all the flies in the world decided that the center of Australia is a very nice place to live in and they are working on creeping into everyone’s noses, ears and eyes. Not very charming, but you survive. We had heard about this before we left Adelaide and had acquired two mosquito nets but we did not think that the problem was so big that we had to use them.

At seven o’clock in the evening we arrived at the campsite where we were going to stay the night. We got a lesson on how to roll out a swag (a kind of heavy-duty duvet cover with built-in bedside). And then we got a sleeping bag each to have in the swag.

PICTURE ON SWAG

The atmosphere was a little pushed in the company after Josh had told us to look up with scorpions, snakes and spiders. After seeing some big spiders and beetles running by, many in the group were not so excited to go to bed, but when Josh told me that the next morning, wake up would be 04.00 there was not much to do.

The stars in the sky was really amazing!

/Christel