Uluru is not the communication officer in Star Trek.....................

“The world is like a book, if you stay at home it’s like reading only the first page”

Our "bus" at the Mt. Ebenezer Roadhouse

That is how Marta explained to me her motivation for travelling. She was paraphrasing a poem hanging in her home in the Netherlands. I thought the doggerel a perfect analogy of my odyssey. In addition to Holland, Australia, the UK and Germany were also represented in our merry band of international adventurers. She and her husband were two of the 14 people in our group partaking in a “WayDownUnder” tour to the Red Centre. For 3 days I had the privilege to journey with them over 1500Km, trek some amazing natural terrain, view glorious sunrise and sunsets; and sleep in swags, out in the bush, under a canopy of a million Southern hemisphere stars.

The endless highway

Chris, our tour guide, picked me up at 5:45am from my hotel. The next two days our wake up time was 5:00; you do not do this on a vacation. I jumped into the front seat of our “bus”, a 4-wheel drive, diesel, behemoth that you almost needed a ladder to get into. Later it would become evident why we needed such a rugged vehicle. As we chatted while making the rounds to collect the rest of the troop, I learned two things: 1) Chris was a Packer fan (Australians obviously don’t understand

Mt. Conner - Not Ayers Rock

The cost of beer

American football) 2) There was another Norbert in the group. Here I am thousands of miles from home, halfway around the world, in the middle of the Australian desert (yes I know it’s an arid zone) only to find a Packer fan and a guy named Norbert . In fact, there was another “WayDownUnder” tour paralleling ours that also had a Norbert in their group.  Three Norb’s in the same place……scary. My Norbert was travelling from Germany with his wife, daughter and son Simon. Our group hit the road, stopping twice at cattle stations (ranches) along the way for a leg stretch, toilet break and coffee. Several hours and almost 450 Km later, we saw it, rising like a rusty stone skyscraper from the flat desert scrubland, the giant, red monolith …..…. Ayers Rock!  Nah, Uluru, the aboriginal name for the sacred rock, it was not.

That was Mt. Conner, a tall, rectangular, flat top mesa that cons people into believing it is Ayer’s Rock (the western name for Uluru).  A bloke on the train had told me about this so I knew it was coming and was not disappointed.

A short time later we did see Uluru and the sight was majestic. It’s hard described the feeling on seeing it for the first time. You’ve been staring at a flat wasteland stretching off to the horizon for

Ayers Rock - Uluru

hours, then plopped down right in the middle of it out of nowhere materializes this large, rounded, red-orange lump of sandstone. You can’t believe what you are seeing; it’s almost like a mirage. You have no clue it’s coming. It’s not like there are other rocks nearby or the foothills to some mountain; just flat, flat flat ……. Boom!  the rock. 

The chain

To climb or not to climb is not only a matter of fitness but a question of personal principles. In the past, the majority of visitors would scale Ayers Rock, however in recent years the aboriginal people have requested people not ascend Uluru because historically the site has been sacred to their society. From the first time I had read about Ayers Rock, I knew I wanted to clamber to the top. Sitting next to 15 year old Simon I asked him if was going to climb the rock; his answer was no. All the while we were driving I kept trying to convince him to come along with me; he kept saying no. The recent controversy with the aboriginal people had me questioning my 

Trail Markers

own decision and when we arrived at the base of Ayers Rock and I saw up-close the steepness of the ascent, I was really second guessing my choice; it has to be about a 70 degree incline for the first part of the climb. When we arrived at Uluru Chris asked who was planning to climb and no one raised their hand except me; although I couldn’t tell if their reluctance was due to sensitivity for the aborigines or the challenge of the climb.  We could see some people making their way up and down along the heavy chain anchored in the rock for the beginning of the climb. I tried one more time to persuade Simon to board the big boulder with me. He spoke to his family in German and then his mom said to me that he would like to climb the rock, but he has no way of carrying his water; you really do need both hands to climb and water to stay hydrated. It sounded like a feeble excuse and my backpack was already coming with me, so I said I would carry his water for him. It was agreed and off we went upwards to the summit while the others wound their way around the base walk.  A few meters up the chain I was regretting have been so persistent. It was about 2:00pm and hot, the sun is beating down on us relentlessly from a cloudless sky, the track is very steep, the rock is rounded like a camel’s back, and the path is not that wide on either side chain.  A few missteps could send you careening over the edge or rolling backwards down the mountain; I would have felt terrible had anything happened to Simon.  About midway up the chain there was a red box which we thought marked the half way point. About ¾ of the way up the chain my lungs were on fire and there was another box. When reached the top of the chain, which we originally thought marked the end of our death march, there was another box. We found out later that the boxes contained defibulators; approximately 40 people have died climbing Ayer’s Rock, mostly from heart attacks. That sounded totally understandable to me, by the time we reached the end of the chain I thought I was going to need one. You literally have to pull yourself up the face of

We made it!

the rock using the chain. We stopped several times along the way to catch our breath, mostly because of me, but I know there were times Simon was thankful for the rest. We made it to the end of the chain and thinking we were almost finished quickly scrambled over the next little hump and realized that we still had a long way to go; with white lines marking the path endlessly trailing off in the distance. And the top of the rock not flat, it has crevasses too wide to jump, undulating up and down, slowly rising until you reach the highest point 354 meters above the desert floor. Of course the view was stunning, miles of desert in every direction, the Olgas (a set of sandstone rocks we would head to tomorrow) 60Km to the southwest, mountains in the far distance. This dry, open, landscape was the opposite end of natural beauty from the lush, green, dense rainforest of Western Tasmania. The wind picked up as we made our way back down was blowing pretty hard when we hit the chain. Going down was way easier; I chose to rappel down backwards using the chain, Simon used the seat-of-the-pants method. When we finally reached the bottom we found out they had closed the rock because of the wind. The park rangers will also close it when it rains (rarely) or if it is too hot (often).  It took us 95 minutes to go up and down and although my climb up Mt. Amos was higher and took longer, the climb up Ayers Rock was much harder. Since we still had some time Chris said I could do Kuniya walk, which goes about a third of the way around the base, and meet him and the bus at the water station. It’s amazing how many people go out without any or not enough water. I was sitting alone on a bench at the water station, trying to absorb and comprehend the aboriginal spirit of this site when coming down the path from the other direction was a sextet of young people. Two of them were loudly yapping on cell phones oblivious to this extraordinary setting.  Why I wondered had they come.

Uluru at sunset

We finished the day watching the sunset perform a magical lightshow on the face of Uluru. Red, crimson, orange, purple, violet, lavender; all the colors at that end of the electromagnetic spectrum dance on its’ surface and make it glow like a dying ember. We watched until the light ran out then moved on to our camp to enjoy a warm shower, some “skippy “ (kangaroo)stew an a sweet slumber in our swags. Tomorrow we would tackle The Olgas.

Bob’s your uncle.

norb