Uluru

My last eight hours on a bus in Australia – I have both a fondness and a mild dread of Greyhound buses now. They are hard on my back and each one has been a seriously loo-oong journey. That said, apart from one slightly suicidal driver on the journey from Melbourne to Sydney back in December, we have been very well taken care of, I’ve felt safe, entertained by the quirky nature of each drivers take on the standard safety advice, and luckily for me this is the most comfortable I’ve been.

It’s twenty-one and a half hours from Alice Springs to Darwin and because the seats are a slightly different shape, and I have a double to myself, I have actually been able to lie down with my knees and feet pressed up against the window…it was without doubt my best night on a Greyhound bus.

I lay there beginning to drift off, thinking about how far we’d come already… and how glad I was that we made it to Uluru.

Before we left the UK we had talked about things we wanted to see in Australia and Uluru was very high on that there list. If we had arrived at the beginning of December we may have had time on the way to Ellie’s, but our  search for a yacht, and those raft building efforts, slowed us down and we ended up rushing across Australia to get to Ellie’s in time for Christmas.

As we came towards the end of our time in Oz we looked again at whether or not we wanted to go to Uluru, everyone said it was an incredible place …and perhaps we needed to do something together as a family before we left Australia. It was going to be hard leaving, and the journey home, well, it was a bloody long way and we needed some fun, a little magic and the odd adventure, not just weeks of hard slog!

For those of you who might not know, Uluru is an ‘island mountain’ it’s a huge rock in the centre of the country, in a vast area of deserty outback…Uluru is a sacred place for the aboriginal peoples, and everyone I’ve met who has ever been there has said that we had to go… some would look a little mystical and talk about the power they felt from the rock…some spoke of a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of the place, and one Australian friend said simply – ‘you just have to go…it’s majestical!’

The getting there had required some planning (good for our logistics muscles to wake up again after a few months off). Uluru was five hours away from Alice Springs (the same distance as Bristol is from Newcastle in the UK). We would either need to get a ‘local’ tour bus to take us there and back (really expensive and we’d miss sunrise and sunset) – we could hire a car in Alice (also very expensive and we’d need a hotel in Alice as well) …or, find a relocation car.

It took a few weeks but I eventually found a car needing to be returned from Adelaide to Alice – it would be a long drive but we would get to be at Uluru for both a sunrise and a sunset.

Relocations are quite a thing in Australia and this one was charging the nominal fee of £2.50 a day for the hire. Theo researched places to stay and found basic campsites along the route which were mostly free so, with Mike’s help, we bought everything we needed to camp: two tarps, three foam mats, some string and ten tent pegs.

We spent less than £12 on the whole lot and Mike said we could pass it all on in Darwin, someone would be sure to know who could use it. The sleeping would be rough but better than on a bus, and we got to have an adventure.

As we left the city of Adelaide our space age sat nav uttered the words ‘keep straight for the next 668 miles’. There really was a whole lot of nothing very much out here…

After several hundred of those miles we found one of the only inhabited places in that vast desert, the opal mining town of Coober Pedy.

It was like nowhere I’ve ever been.

Old rusted out vehicles and large bits of mining machinery, tumble down shacks and big stacks of tyres. Scraped earth and small stones the backdrop for a creative survival mentality that didn’t have much room for sentimentality …and everywhere you looked, mounds of earth, evidence of the search for a way out of here.

Sixty percent of the 3,500 people living in the town live underground because of the intense heat, (are the other 40% made of asbestos?)

I struggled to understand what makes someone choose to live in the middle of a desert where it’s so hot you have to live underground? Opals is probably one answer…but once you’ve found one? …well, maybe the sky full of stars and the gentle clanking of the mining machinery feels like home after a while. The ability of human beings to connect and make communities, even in the most inhospitable environments, is a little inspiring…

Rosa really liked Coober Pedy, as far as insane places to live go it’s pretty high up on my list – I think the dystopianness was what attracted her, but me, I was glad we weren’t staying the night.

Back on the road we scoured the landscape for creatures and after a whole lot of not much we saw a bright reddy orange lizard stood squarely in the middle of the road… as we approached it scuttled onto the warm reddy orange earth off to one side and was immediately lost to view. A hundred or so miles later we saw a small flock of emus – they are so big and weird looking : )

One of the things we had learned about Australia was that there had been a war declared on emus in 1932 because they were eating all the crops…these are the bare facts:

’The emus won the war. After six days, with emu fatalities in the low hundreds, the shooting was temporarily halted, then abandoned a few weeks later. Subsequent requests for military help were refused.’

‘Stralia!’

…it was great being able to stop and watch emus going about their normal every day lives, and rest whenever we wanted to, but it was a long drive…we listened to a great audiobook read by Michael Sheen (we love him) but after the night on the bus from Melbourne to Adelaide we got tired early that night. The first campsite was simple and sleeping on a thin roll mat in the windy desert wasn’t quite as romantic as the star filled peace I had imagined. After a good two hour attempt a bunch of ants moved into my sleeping sack so I joined Rosa back in the car and had a pretty good nights sleep. Theo, blissfully unaware of the ant threat slept well and as dawn kissed that big big sky, we were on our way again.

When we finally turned off the Stuart Highway, the main (and only) road that goes all the way from North to South – covering the 2720km from the top of the Northern Territories to Southern Australia we were grateful for the change of scenery and we could tell that there was a difference to the landscape after a while, and quite quickly the wispy cloud cover got thicker and we could see darker clouds ahead.

About an hour in we saw a huge rock appear in the distance – if that was it (the map said we were still over 70 miles away) then it was really, REALLY big, but after another half an hour we began to drive past – clearly Uluru was not the only bloody big rock sticking out of the desert in the middle of Australia.

The cloud turned to rain and wind just before we arrived. We had the first two days of rain there had been in two months. The ticket woman at the National Park entrance told us it had been a (very un) pleasant 40 degrees the day before we arrived…and pretty much every other day for the whole of the summer. Briefly sad though we were, not to see the spectacular colours at sunset and sunrise, our first sight of Uluru captured us all….

We just sat quietly, looking, and then, after a while, we went to say hello.

Ancient and huge, a giant asleep in the desert, a beautiful giant, decked in soft warm red clothes.

These beautiful monoliths, Uluru and Kata Tjuta, started to form 550 million years ago, slowly rising out of the sea, and they are still here…these rocks know patience.

We had arrived in good time for sunset (or overcast skies that gradually go dark) and our plan for the next day had originally been to get up before dawn and walk around the 10 km base of Uluru as the sun was rising …but we had some new challenges now – we had an injured Theo.

His knee had been hurting on and off since he fell of a wall on a sight-seeing trip with Mike in Newcastle (Australian Newcastle) and carrying his rucksack that first morning in Melbourne, after only a few hours sleep, had not been good for it.

We had spent that day with Gabriel, the son of a really dear friend from England who was studying in Melbourne for a year as part of his uni course. We had a lovely soft day going to the botanical gardens and ate at a great $5 a meal cafe – it was all we were fit for after the emotion of the night before and when we said goodbye to him we were a little lighter… The journey across Melbourne to cousin Daisy’s house to meet her new baby finally did for Theo though, and his knee was properly hurting when we arrived.

We had loads of cuddles with that gorgeous baby – Daisy and Adam were so good with him, and he was a total sweetheart – for us he was so tiny and little but for Daisy and Adam he was huge and already leaving little baby hood behind 🙂

The next morning Theo woke up with what he thought was cramp but after we’d persuaded him that one knee being twice the size of the other was actually a cause for concern he went and had an expensive trip to the Dr’s (thank you Britain for our fabulous, if horribly underfunded, NHS) The doctor said she thought it was probably a ‘Bakers cyst’ bursting, the injury had made the synovial fluid in his knee overproduce and it had gathered in a cyst …and yes it would heal on its own but no carrying rucksacks or going for long walks.

Slightly challenging when we’ve got a 10,000 mile journey ahead of us…

Theo had been resting it since we left Melbourne, although long bus journeys are good for the rest part of the recovery process they are not the easiest places to keep a swollen knee elevated and iced.

He was taking one day at a time and sitting in the back of the car with his leg up was helping…we kept coming up with ingenious ways to stop Theo having to carry things and cries of ‘no, Theo!’ …have been uttered in more than one occasion as he goes to try and do his bit and we try and stop him…

After our first moments with Uluru we headed over to Kata Tjuta to pay our respects – Rosa and I walked into a valley fold in one of the mountains, a unique habitat for hill kangaroos, kestrels and echidna (we searched hard for an echidna because Rosa hadn’t seen one, and we almost managed to convince ourselves that a particularly spiky looking rock was one, but in the end we had to be content with the two swooping kestrels we saw) …after an hour or so we went back to the car and on to our second campsite, which was quite swanky and had cookers and showers and actual pitches but it was raining so we all slept in the car…

The next morning at 4.30 Theo knew it didn’t make sense for him to walk around the base with us. Rosa and I set off in the dark feeling sad to leave him behind but we all knew that the bigger goal was him being able to trek in the rain forests in Sumatra…Theo wanted to see orangutans in the wild and to do that he needed to be able to walk.

Theo is also pretty good at coping with change and disappointment and he sat with that beautiful mountain emerging as the light returned and watched us disappear into the gloom  as we headed off for our six mile hike.

It was a wonderful thing to do as a mum and daughter, we loved the soft change that dawn brought to the landscape, all the different colours of Uluru – we loved the shapes and gentle folds of the rock and we DID NOT love the flies – I made my peace with the little winged beasts in the end but Rosa, not so much…

As we walked we noticed lots of places where we were asked not to take photos out of respect for the aboriginal beliefs and culture – ‘Uluru is a living scripture’… my kind of religion!

As we walked we talked about the trip and how much fun we had had here in Oz, how many wonderful places we had been and incredible things we had seen…sometimes we only know the shape of what it is we need, or we just create a space for something to happen in, and this time that instinct had been right – the goodbye was still hurting, but seeing Daisy and Gabriel had helped (and trying to see Matilda but Theo’s knee had defeated us!) …and now Uluru was giving us the time and space to both let go, and reconnect.

We got to say ‘thank you’ for so many things as we walked around the giant red island mountain …and we allowed ourselves to start thinking of home, of family and friends we loved and missed, Tequila (Rosa’s cat not the drink!), our little home …and the miserable English weather…for the first time ever we were really looking forward to a winter : )

As we came to the end Theo came to meet us and we did the last little bit together …it was time to go, we had a bus to catch – our last one to Darwin, and as we drove towards Alice Springs we thought about the things we would be saying goodbye to and some things we would always remember:

1) Aussies stick the letter ‘o’ at the end of every word they can

• ‘Afternoon – arvo’
• ‘Service station – servo’
• ‘Bottle opener – bottlo’
• ‘Dogs – doggo’

2) There is a down to earth directness in the Aussie that has even made it into the civil service. Those responsible for public service road side littering campaigns having come up with the slogan: ‘Don’t be a tosser’

3) The sheer vastness of the place is bonkers

4) The diversity and general deadliness of the wildlife is not like anything anywhere else on the planet

5) ‘The Castle’ is a really great movie

6) Leeches are NOT the best thing about Australia

7) There ARE snakes and there ARE wombats

8) …and finally how wonderful my sister is (might be a bit specific that one : )

Back in the dark on the bus I am not quite asleep, reflecting again on the pain of leaving, is it different if you know you will never come back?

…I know I can’t face that right now so I’m pretending to myself that this twenty thousand mile round trip is a journey doable more than once in a lifetime – and the truth is, I don’t even know if I’m pretending – I want to come back so much that maybe I will one day.

We have so many endings in life that just pass us by, I can’t remember how old Rosa was the last time she wanted to be carried up the path to our house, the the last time she ever asked to be read a story… and then there’s endings we face and build up to, leaving my job at a school I helped open and walking out for the last time…taking Rosa to university this September. We make choices and we feel what we feel, and try to be kind to ourselves when what we feel is hard to cope with…

I flick my phone to my favourites photo album and look through some of our photos – I smile as I see the laughter and love in the faces of my family.

I reflect on who my sister is, the warmth and generosity I recognise from our mum and nan, the dogs she adores and that keep her safe and loved when she’s sad, her quick mind and how brilliantly funny she is…outrageous and kind, anxious and pragmatic. A great friend and a brilliant mum.

Ellie opened her whole world to us, gave Rosa the home she needed and helped us find beautiful places to stay…she shared her family and friends and most importantly of all Martha, and Wilbur ‘the best dog’.

Goodbye ‘Stralia – you can keep your leeches and flies but the rest we will treasure forever.