Date of Adventure 9-13 December 2024
I’m going to do two separate blogs on the time at Uluru. This one will be mostly about the experience and the second one about the beauty and the photos. So if you don’t want to read a bunch of personal bullshit, skip to the next.
Camping at Uluru: The area directly around Uluru is a National Park. In recent years it has become more tightly controlled. There’s no camping and it’s only open limited hours, 5 AM to something like 9 PM. Entry permits are good for 3 days and cost about 40 AUD. So, close, outside the park, there’s a kind of village called Yulara or Ayers Rock. That’s where the campground is located. The village contains a bunch of hotels at various price levels (maybe 7 or 8), a lot of cafes and restaurants, a small (pretty well stocked) store, post office, etc. The next nearest place you can legally camp is about 80 km away. The price for one person, one vehicle in the campground is pretty high, 50 AUD per night. I’d made reservations for 2 nights. The whole village is pretty well done, if a little different from what I would have preferred. Camping was fine but only because it was way off season. If the campground had been full it would have been too crowded and difficult for me. Here’s what the campsite and general camping area looked like.
I never had anyone camped next to me and the nearest was about 3 sites down. The bathrooms and showers were well done and clean and there’s a camp kitchen, not too far from my campsite. I didn’t take any photos of it but there was also a really exposed area about 100 meters from where I was camped that is clearly set up for unpowered camping during the busy season. In the end, I spent 4 nights there, as I’ll describe below.
I find it interesting that this is the first place, in all of my travels here, that I’ve seen any rabbits. You can look it up, but Australia has had several major infestations of rabbits. Some guy, in the late 1800’s released a bunch of rabbits so they could have rabbit hunts. Well the beggars have no natural predators and became terrible pests. They have been controlled a couple of times through biowarfare so aren’t as bad as they have been. I’m still surprised that this is the only place I’ve seen any.
I went to the park visitors center the day after I checked in. It’s about 20 km drive from the campground to the visitors center, called the Cultural Centre. It’s a very interesting setup with several small buildings in a sort of compound. Extremely well done! One small building is the real cultural part with displays of the indigenous culture and some stories. They have a fairly long video about the lifestyle and foods of the indigenous people in the area. The video is really interesting, if poorly produced. It helped me to add to the information that I got a few days before when I visited Papunya. There were about 500 different indigenous groups when the white man arrived. They are mostly defined by language. I guess that there were around 100 different languages and then all of the dialects of each language. Now there are only a handful of different languages recognized and used. I suppose that some groups have been mixed together and some were killed off in white settlement activities. Photography is not allowed in the cultural building. The video showed how the people lived, moving every 2 to5 days, mostly from water source to water source. At about 11:30 I went to a “ranger talk” by a young white woman who is really invested in the local culture. With her information and what I learned in the Cultural building I’m still totally amazed at the lives that these people lived. They really had no political unity. Nothing like the “tribes” of Native Americans. They did have cultural stories, including creation stories and histories. Many of the stories are, apparently, only told within their own units. They lived and travelled in very small groups, maybe 15 or 20 people, not a whole tribe. I could probably write on and on about this but I’d get some of the facts wrong so I won’t say much more. It’s been a very enlightening experience for me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “society” at all like this. The Native Americans that I know about have a much more developed societal interaction and the little that I remember from people who knew and visited the native tribes in the Amazon when we lived in Brazil told of much more tribal interactions. I just don’t envisage how the indigenous peoples of the red center of Australia will interact with modern white society. At this point I’ll interject that the indigenous people that I saw and the little I learned in the region around the Daintree Rain Forest are very different from those in the red center. They look very different so must have a different genetic background. They are also a bit different from the indigenous people I saw at the north end of Cape York.
The Cultural Centre, as I said, has several buildings that include one with a bunch of displays and a “ranger desk” as well as a café and a couple of art galleries. The local art is quite interesting and I might have bought something except I don’t want to add to the amount of junk I’m carrying around already.
I had thought of doing a fairly long hike but the timing wasn’t good so I did a short one to some of the interesting sites at the base of Uluru (photos in next blog) and took it easy that afternoon because I was planning to get up for sunrise photos of Uluru.
The next day I got up early, before 5:00, and drove out to the area where you can see the sunrise hitting Uluru. Well, it was an overcast morning and the sun never did “rise”. At least not through the clouds. They have an area set up to make it easy for people to photograph sunrise and there were a fair number of people there. We all got skunked and most of them left pretty quickly. I was a little disappointed but hung around until everyone had left just to appreciate the location and the quiet of the desert.
It’s been hot…running close to 40 C every day. I did a little walking around and went back to the campground that day. When I got up the next morning, planning to leave, I just felt like things were incomplete so decided to spend another day. I decided that I’d “hike” around Uluru on the base trail and see about taking some sunset photos. In a way I object to the price of the campsite but for me it’s the only way to stay that close and be able to do some of the things I want. I hiked around Uluru at about 11:00 AM. It’s supposed to be a little over 10 km but my GPS said it was 9.5 km. There were hardly any people on the trail. It’s a very well maintained, well built trail. I think you could do it in a wheelchair. Photos are in the next blog. When I got back to my car the temperature was 37 C. That evening I went to the overlook for sunset photos kind of early. By the time it got close to sunset there were maybe 50 people but plenty of room. I took a shitload of pictures, trying to get the shadows and colors as the sun set.
I’m glad I spent the extra day. It’s been difficult at times to convince myself that I don’t have to keep going.