When you're on a three-week trip-of-a-lifetime to Australia - like ours of last
October - there are some things you feel kind of obliged to do. So on the
22nd, we flew from Sydney to
Ayer's Rock.
(Note: For convenience, I'll refer to the actual darn great lump of rock in the middle of the Outback as "Uluru", and the modern developments around it - with the
airport and the resort/hotel complex - as "Ayer's Rock".)
Actually, in retrospect, it's possible that we were so determined to take in all the big stuff in or around that area that we didn't commit quite enough time to Uluru itself. We only got at all close to it once, briefly, on the last day of the trip. But as the photos should show, we saw it plenty. It does one thing. It sits there,
geologically. It's a simple sort of object, but it has
presence. It's hard to sum it up beyond that, but there's a reason for its fame.
The other oddity about our trip was that we happened to get there in the wake of quite a bit more precipitation than the Outback usually sees. We didn't catch significant amounts of rain ourselves - although one barbecue dinner got moved indoors - and it was still
hot, but there was a bit more cloud and haze disrupting the legendary Outback sunlight, and the pictures may show a bit more green than most that you get from that region. Still, we got plenty of sense of
desert.
Anyway, we got an early flight out of Sydney, arrived in the afternoon, checked into our
hotel (in the admirably low-profile and appealing resort development), grabbed some lunch, and then got on the coach for our first bit of touring - a trip to
Kata Tjuta (also known as Mount Olga to the first European explorer to sight it from a few miles away, and hence casually referred to as "The Olgas" by every visitor who gets closer and realises that it's more plural than singular). This, to save people some Googling, is geologically a sort of twin to Uluru, a few miles away - but where Uluru is resolutely monolithic and resistant to erosion, Kata Tjuta has fractured and broken along vertical lines of stratification. Hence, we got to stroll deep into a red-rock cleft between towering cliffs, then turned around and ambled back. It may not sound like much, but you've got to understand the sheer alien-ness of this scenery.
Oh, and did I mention the heat, too?
Then we got back on the coach to head back to watch the effect of the sunset light on Uluru. First, though, we got to see one (1) feral camel from the coach, and paused for another chance to contemplate Kata Tjuta in the distance. Anyway, the (cloud-filtered) sunset effect was pretty cool.
Then we had the scheduled barbecue that mutated into an indoor buffet - in our own
hotel, as it turned out. But it was actually rather good, with a chance to try some weird local crustaceans and so forth.
The
next day involved an
early start (and, fortunately, a reasonable chance to doze on the coach); we were heading for
King's Canyon, which may not look very far on the map, but which is in a noticeably different ecological zone. Around Uluru, the only grass you get is spinifex, and the only thing that eats spinifex is termites.
Head north-west, though (a long way round, due to there being a dry lake thing in the way), and you get country that's one notch more verdant; there are even wild horses living in the area, as we saw from the coach and in captivity at
King's Creek Station, where we stopped for breakfast.
As we approached King's Canyon, the tour guides began describing options. Basically, one can either take a wlak around the rim of the canyon - mostly unshaded, in scorching heat, though with a chance to see a waterhole at the head of the canyon called the Garden of Eden - or one can wimp out and take a lighter stroll up the floor of the canyon.
We wimped out.
Well, mostly. We did take an option to climb half-way up to the rim for a bit of view and to see how it felt. But it was clear that the guides were seriously trying to dissuade too many people from trying the rim walk who were going to pass out half way and need the attention of a medical helicopter. And did I mention the heat?
We were bemused, though, to see that the party setting off for the full, nigh-dangerous walk seemed to consist largely of assorted Asian tourists who looked less well dressed or equipped for it than we were ourselves. Was this a
face thing, I wondered stereotypically?
Anyhow, we left them to it after going up and down the partial climb (good for a view, some boasting value in its own right), then headed off with a guide into the canyon floor.
Which was, I should say, well worth it; the whole canyon has the feel of an oasis in the Outback desert, mingling eucalyptus trees and other local flora with great fragments of orange rock fallen from the walls. Although the paths have been cleared and smoothed enough to make this a fairly comfortable exercise, there's some definite sense of primal Australia to be had, and an awareness that one is on ... well, not another planet, but definitely the other side of one's own planet.
Then we got back to the coach, and went off to wait for the rim-walkers. Which was where the one drawback in this tour schedule appeared. Our tour had inevitably taken less time than theirs, and the place we ended up waiting was
King's Canyon Resort, which doubtless serves the purpose of providing accommodation well enough, but is otherwise a bit uninspiring - there wasn't a huge amount to see or do (unless one was prepared to pay the serious cost of a 'plane flight round the area), and the lunch options were kind of limited. Basically, a couple of hours of high-temperature thumb-twiddling ensued.
Ah well. We eventually got to make the return trip to Ayer's Rock, complete with another comfort stop at
Curtin Springs Station (with an emu to admire - hey, proper Aussie wildlife!), and a chance to be confused by
Fooluru. (Uh, Mount Conner - a mesa that resembles Ayer's Rock enough from a distance to befuddle careless visitors.)
Which left us back at the hotel complex with the evening to ourselves. So after a bit of a look around, we strolled through the big, magnificently
red open central area to the viewpoint in the middle, and watched dusk fall on
Uluru and
Kata Tjutu in the distance. Then, in due course, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner in one of the swisher restaurants around the place, including a sampling plate with
kangaroo and
emu meat. I guess it was kind of just as well we'd seen both on the hoof by then.
And then, on the
24th, we had another fairly early start, to go see Uluru by sunrise (slight haze in the sky still notwithstanding). Which trip ended with a coach run round much of the perimeter of the thing, so we got to say a respectful farewell.
And then it was back to the resort for breakfast and checkout, and on to the
airport for our flight back to Sydney - with a last view of the scenery from the plane. So I guess we packed a fair bit in there.
When one heads off to Australia - as we did last October - it seems that part of the point should be seeing some of the local wildlife. And we did, at various points - but a lot of those animals had the traditional wild animal tendency to hide from human inspection, or at least not to be where we happened to be. So we decided to cheat, a little, and spend a day in Sydney's Taronga Zoo. The only snag was, the day we scheduled for this (the 25th) turned out to be the greyest and wettest of the entire trip. Oh well.
Actually, we wrapped a little other sightseeing (and required shopping) around the zoo trip, starting with a stroll down George Street as far as the rather grand Queen Victoria Building with its two huge and slightly kitsch roof-suspended clocks, then heading back up to Circular Quay to pick up a ferry across the harbour. The zoo actually has a rather wonderful location, on the slope of one of the many hills running down to the water; when one arrives by ferry, one can catch a cable car over the zoo to the entrance higher up the slope. (Assuming that the wind isn't strong enough to close the cable car, that is. We got lucky and arrived before that happened.) The zoo itself also seems fine, with a range of animals including but not limited to a lot of Aussie species. The animals look quite happy and healthy, too.
So yes, we did get to see koalas, a saltwater crocodile, a komodo dragon (okay, not native, but right end of the planet, okay?), assorted kangaroos and wallabies, a cassowary, an emu, a Tasmanian devil, and even a couple of monotremes. The latter, by the way, are a bit like hard work for the return; the echidnas just slumped and whiffled around with their snouts in feeding tubes, while the zoo's platypus is in a large tank in a darkened room, around which visitors stand waiting for glimpses through the aquatic vegetation. Plus, we saw a lot of assorted smaller Aussie fauna, including a local snake and lizard being introduced to the public by one of the keepers and looking quite elegant in the process.
The zoo also has a fair number of the universal zoo favourites, incidentally - chimps, elephants, giraffes, and so on. The location made for a dramatic backdrop for the ibex enclosure in particular, and it turned out that, completely by chance, we were there on the first day that the litter of cubs recently born to the resident Sumatran tigress were on view to the public.
Then, on the way out, exiting in traditional fashion through the gift shop, we discovered the bonus exhibit. The shop has a huge floor-to-ceiling window, looking into the tank occupied by one of the zoo's resident sea lions - an amiable creature who appeared as interested in looking at people as people were at looking at her. Special bonus points for the sympathy play; apparently, she's an orphan whose mother was killed by a shark
Anyhow, zoo trip done, we rode the ferry back across the harbour, and stayed on as far as Darling Harbour. Stuff to see there: ships outside the Maritime Museum, fountains and water features ... but we would be going back that way the next day. For now, we followed the monorail track back to George Street, strolled back to the hotel, took the lift up to the rooftop viewing platform for some panoramic views of the rain-washed centre of the city, then eventually made our way back to the Rocks/Circular Quay area for dinner in an Italian restaurant.
