KM 4599 bis 5170 – Uluru and surroundings: the heart of Australia blows your mind

It shows how excited we were about finally getting to Uluru that, after almost 1000 kilometers through the Outback, we thought we had spotted him in the distance already when a sign told us we were still 130km away from it. But it wasn’t after another sign saying “Mount Connor Lookout, 400m on the right” that we would actually believe the thing we had seen wasn’t Uluru (According to the Lonely Planet a common mistake).
However, when we finally had the “Real Deal” in sight, the grand Uluru or Ayer’s Rock, we couldn’t believe how we ever could have mistaken his truly unique appearance with any other rock or mountain. Situated in the middle of a flat desert, with colours and even its shape changing with the sunlight, you can really understand why the Aborigines chose it as a holy site. It really is so stunning a sight you should sit down and meditate on this experience for some time. However, as it’s kind of hard to meditate and take pictures at the same time, we chose a less esoteric approach and just enjoyed the sight with a nice glass of wine, some Camembert and crackers ;-)
After an amazing sunset the first evening the sunrise the next morning was at least just as good, an explosion of yellow, orange and red glowing clouds amidst a seemingly endless sky, and Uluru sitting in the middle of it all. All that was definitely worth the three days driving towards it and the 25$ entrance fee for the national park. Unfortunately, after that it was over with sunny skies, in the evening it even started to rain!! So here we are, in he middle of Australia, desert for hundreds of kilometres around uns, an area that gets at most two days of rain a month and we’re there for one of them. If we just had that kind of luck playing the lottery… However, the sunrise the next morning made up for that, big time. It’s actually indescribable how beautiful that was, even the pictures hardly do it justice. (By the way, no, we’ve haven’t become gay and are adoring every sunrise and sunset now. But after all, Uluru is just a rock – you just need some special light to make it look cool. Same goes for beaches, by the way: In the end, it’s just sand and water…).
The last highlight of our Heart-of-Australia-Tour was King’s Canyon. Going from Uluru to Alice Springs it’s a detour of more than 300 kilometres, but it’s definitely worth every last one of them. A short hike gets you up to the rim of the canyon and from there it’s basically a two hours tour of just amazing views that change every couple of metres. Again, pretty indescribable the whole thing, the pictures probably give you a better impression than words ever could.

KM 3044 to 4600 – The Outback: Lord of the flies and a town underground

Nothing. Loads of it. Loads of fucking Nothing. Loads of blue Nothing in the sky and loads of red Nothing on the ground. That’s basically the Outback, fascinating at times, but mostly just big and wide and red and endless and, well, lots of Nothing.
And in between the blue and the red Nothing: flies. Loads of them. Loads of fucking flies of the supernasty kind, the kind of “I’m getting on your nerves until you either completely freak or until you reach a level of patience only achieved by the wisest and oldest Buddhist monks”-flies.
But apart from the flies there’s not much to distract you from the Nothingness and the Vast-ness of the Outback: Going down hundreds of kilometres you still can count the cars passing you on one hand and the street’s also everything but entertaining, with hundreds of kilometres of pure straightness, only sometimes interrupted by a slight curve (that the guys planning the road actually just put there to make the road less boring, like a according sign told us later on).
Except that the only sight in this vast Nothing are gas stations every couple of hundred kilometres and “towns”. That is, if you really wanna call a place with 300 people, a “historic site” and a tourist information a “town”. Seriously, who lives here? Or even worse, who moves here? I mean, there’s no almost literally no infrastructure except running water and electricity (and I’m not a 100% sure on that one), probably no jobs, hardly any other people, no entertainment except TV and incest.
That goes also for the town of Coober Pedy, Australia’s “Opal capital” (which is kind of true, with almost 2/3 of the world’s opals being mined here) and a perfect example for the above mentioned “town”: Situated literally in the desert, inmidst of just dust and opalmines, with a landscape similar to that of Mars (Seriously, there’s even been a newspaper article on it, we’ve seen the pictures and it really IS damn similar!), it’s depressing to just imagine living here. The fascinating thing however is, that half the town exists literally underground: churches, bars, apartments, hotels are actually dug into the rocks because this offers a sort of natural airconditioning. It’s probably the only way to live here in the boiling heat of a summer day and the freezing cold of a winter night here and not go nuts.
So, yes, the Outback is sort of fascinating for some time, however, after about a thousand kilometres of Nothing now, we’re definitely for what we’ve really come for: Uluru.