The wet centre

Getting on for twenty years ago, I piggy-backed a holiday on a friend who made work visits to Ghana. We flew from Accra up to Tamale in the north to spend Christmas in Mole National Park. Through my friend’s connections we got offered a ride in a jeep for the return journey involving several hundred kilometres on dirt roads. I said that it would be great to have an adventure.

About 50 kilometers into the journey, the fan belt broke. We spent the rest of the journey stopping at regular intervals to improvise a replacement out of anything and everything that we had with us. (Disgracefully, neither friend nor I had the traditional pair of tights with us.) Instead of making Accra by nightfall, we limped into Kumasi as the light failed, luckily found a hotel, and got the fan belt fixed the following morning. I was stonily reminded that I had wanted an adventure.

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The campervan had to be back in Alice by three in the afternoon. I had planned my route so that there would be no problem in getting back on time - the earlier parts of my tour of the Red Centre being on dirt, where the weather or my relatively inexperienced driving off asphalt might delay things, and the return journey on good roads: the first 250 km from Yulara (the resort near Uluru) on the Lasseter Highway to the Roadhouse at Erlunda at the junction with the Stuart Highway, which would then take me the last 200 km to Alice. Four hundred and fifty km on good roads: four and a half hours driving – no problem. So I even had time for a second shot at watching the sun rise on Uluru.

Since completing the Mereenie loop three days before, it had been trying to rain: a few spots now and then, and even enough to put up the umbrella for a few minutes, but nothing significant. So I thought nothing of it when it was raining lightly as I went to sleep. The alarm went at 4.30 and it was raining: persistently, but not cats and dogs. I switched off the alarm and went back to sleep, woke again at 7 and was ready to leave by 8. There was quite a lot of water in the campsite: this was the main road through the site and a couple of vans on their sites (I’d been high and dry), but standing water’s expected on packed ground:

I called in at the campsite reception to check if there was more detailed weather information, and heard the receptionist informing the man in front that no, there would be no trouble in reaching Alice. I hope he had a 4WD and left straight away.

It was still just raining steadily when I left. There was plenty of standing water alongside the road, but the road was clear of water. The rain picked up a bit. The visibility dropped. I caught up with a petrol tanker that was doing about 80 kph, and got stuck behind it, because I couldn’t see far enough ahead to overtake: the first you could see of an oncoming car was its headlights – if it had them on. Signs started for Curtin Springs – 85 km out from Yulara, and the only Roadhouse before the Stuart Highway, another 165 km away. I decided that if the tanker didn’t stop, I would (to let it get a bit ahead again), and that if it stopped, I wouldn’t. Luckily it did, and I didn’t.

A little later I hit the first puddle on the road – maybe 10 meters of it. Then it started raining harder, and the road was so wet it was impossible to see where the puddles were. I took comfort in the fact that at least there would only be puddles on the flat parts of the road or dips – and promptly hit an unseen puddle on an incline (the water was simply crossing the road on its route downhill).

The next puddle was deeper and about 100 meters long. I was followed through by a 4WD pulling a large caravan, who overtook as soon as we were clear. The next puddle was about 300 meters of water and caravan man went through with a spray of water to either side. Madman, I thought. At the next one I caught up with the caravan madman, who was stopped in mid puddle, just short of a patch where water flowing across the road was creating small standing waves. Well that’ll teach him, thought I. Then he reappeared from in front of his vehicle – he’d been walking the water washing across the road -, gave me a thumbs-up, climbed in, and was off again. So was I.

When you’re in a tricky situation, and have reached the limit of your experience, the only thing to do is to decide who does know what they’re doing and stick to them. So I stuck to my poisson pilote. I figured that, in a land cruiser with a snorkel air intake, the vehicle I was in would go anywhere that his would. When he overtook, I overtook. When someone was stopped just before some water and he drove round them, I drove round them. One time he drove through the water with his nearside wheels over the white line along the edge of the road. I followed as exactly as I could. It was only when I was level with it, that I realised that there was a swirling whirlpool just to our right which indicated where the flowing water had dug a deep pothole in the tarmac maybe three or four feet across.

In between the patches of water, the poisson pilote sped along at 110 kph or more. It was still raining heavily, and the conditions could only get worse. I wondered whether he was trying to get through before it became impassable. We passed a sedan that had just been towed out of the water by a 4WD. And then we reached a patch of water where three or four cars and buses pulled over onto the verge on the far side. The turbulence of the water ‘falling’ off the side of the asphalt had dug out about a 30 cm drop, and was beginning to undermine the edge of the asphalt. My poisson pilote stopped on the far side and spoke to one of the drivers. I just followed.

I could tell from my satnav that we were almost to the Roadhouse at Erdlunda on the Stuart Highway, and considered what to do if my poisson pilote continued in the direction of Alice without stopping. We had covered 165 km in just over two hours, and crossed maybe 30-40 patches of water of more than just puddle depth. In the event, he pulled in. I went over to thank him. No problems, and then, without a trace of irony, I wasn’t going too fast for you in between? No, it was fine. I wanted to get though before it got worse. Yes, I’d guessed that.

I asked if he was going on to Alice, and, if so, how long he was stopping for. He said they were stopping for lunch, but that he thought I’d be fine from there on.

There was an awful lot of water around.

Inside the roadhouse, a small group of people were milling around. A couple who had got through in a sedan had finally lost their nerve and booked a room. Two policemen were hanging around talking to travellers and quietly, politely and professionally giving advice. No, they hadn’t closed the road to Yulara – yet, but their official advice was that only 4WDs should attempt to get through now. If it stopped raining now, the road would be passable again in about 24 hours.

 I got myself a chicken and chips take away in the shop, and walked into the bar, where a large sign proclaimed that no take aways were to be eaten there, to get a coffee. There was no one else in there, so I asked if it was OK if I ate my takeaway. Yes, fine, so long as I ate at the table that the last group of people had eaten at, which hadn’t been cleared yet. The woman chatted amicably about the road conditions while she made my regular flat white.

The rain continued on and off all the way to Alice, but the Stuart Highway has culverts and bridges, and the few puddles were just that – just a few cm deep. And so I got the campervan back in time, and caught my flight to Cairns. And this time I hadn’t even wished for an adventure.

Kata Tjuta

About 50 kilometers west of Uluru there is another rock - or rather group of rocks - sticking up from the plain.

This is Kata-Tjuta, and the rocks were formed at the same time as Uluru. Unlike Uluru, however, the rock strata weren't tilted on edge, but remained more or less horizontal, and a grid of vertrical joints in the rock gradually eroded downwards to leave a series of 36 dome shaped rocks of varying height. The summit of the tallest dome is about 500 meters (1500 feet) above the base, so is about half as high again as Uluru.


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The European name for Kata-Tjuta is the Olgas, and close to, the domes do seem like a group of old women leaning towards each other in conversation. I was disappointed to have this mental image clouded when I discovered that they were not originally named as a group of women, but that the highest dome is called Mount Olga after Queen Olga of Württenberg, a nineteenth century Russian Grand Duchess, who was interested in geology, and some of whose mineral collection can be seen in the museum in Stuttgart.



There is a rather fine walk - called the Valley of the Winds - that takes you through the clefts between some of the large domes, and into the central plain. Because of the way that the domes have formed, the clefts between adjacent domes have 'cols' at the points that adjacent domes are closest. The route takes you first over a low col, and the path looks as though it's been made by cementing large boulders together. It has indeed, but this is the rock - a 'conglomerate' - that Kata-Tjuta is made of, the boulders are from an alluvial fan, and the cement is the sandstone matrix. The smooth path surface was simply made by clearing the loose rubble to each side into a 'kerb':

From the top of the first col there's a view into the wide valley below:

The path descends, and turns right in the valley to head up between the giants:

As the valley narrows, the walls tower up on either side, sculpted in places by temporary cascades during rain:

The path continues upwards towards the second and higher col, with the cleft narrowing on either side. It had been grey for most of the day, and I expected that the view at the top would be much the same as the rocks that I was among.

Instead, the view was breathtaking: the ground dropped away steeply, so that the sandstone walls rose up almost vertically on either side for hundreds of feet. In the distance, on the other side of a wide green valley, was a row of lower domes. And somehow the sun managed to creep in between the clouds to light the scene:

The path descended into the wooded cleft, and then curled left around the foot of the dome to give a fine view out over the plain before loopong back over the first col.

I started the walk later in the day than I'd intended, and was worried whether there would be enough time to complete it before it got dark. As I climbed the first col, I stopped a young couple coming down to ask them what the walk was like and how long it had taken them. The girl looked shattered and just said "it's very hard". I nearly cut the walk short and turned back at the first col. If I had, I would have missed the strange world between the ancient domes - and that unforgettable view.

Dunes

Uluru dominates the landscape from tens of kilometers away. Its bulk sets the scale and makes smaller features seem inconsequential, but there are some ripples on the landscape whch provide a unique habitat and reveal a little of the Red Centre even under this year's green assault: wind-blown dunes of orange-red sand. The dunes are about 5-10 meters in height and about 100 meters in length, and the countryside with dunes extends for more than 50 kilometers in each direction from Uluru.

The dunes are the habitat of some special animals - like the marsupial mole, a golden-coloured silky-haired marsupial equivalent of our European mole that 'swims' through the sand dunes, but makes no burrows because the soft sand falls in behind it. Marsupial moles are subterranean, but many of the other animals are also nocturnal and difficult to see. However, like everywhere in the Red Centre, plants are in full bloom. The dunes are typically covered in low shrubs ...

... but like elsewhere, there were many blooming herbacious plants, ...

... including several red and pink species which seem to have been chosen with reckless disregard for the colour scheme:

All of the flowers are species that I have only seen growing on the dunes. Some seem to especially like the open sand, and I wonder in what proportion of years they flower:

The Green Centre bis: cage and aviary birds

When I was young I kept budgerigars: I got my first one - a blue female called 'Penny' (who was shortly after joined by a green male called 'Oddy') - for my eighth birthday. They lived in a small cage indoors, but for my ninth birthday I got about a dozen budgies and a second-hand outdoor aviary. Each summer I put up nestboxes in the aviary, and the birds produced a few broods of chicks. At that time there was a weekly newspaper for people who kept birds: Cage and Aviary Birds, and I had a regular order with the newsagent, and read it avidly when it was delivered with the other newspapers, chiefly making plans (that rarely came to fruition) to acquire all manner of other birds.

So the sounds of budgerigars are familar to me and stand out from the rest of the acoustic landscape. From the first day out of Alice when I stopped to take a photo at a floodway, wherever there is water - be it Palm Valley or the waterholes around Uluru - there is the familiar chirping and choking song. The thing that tickles me most is that, part from the fact they are all the same colour and that they are not captive, they are just like the birds that I kept: the same song, but also the same behaviour - pairs propsecting for nest holes, and squabbling with others, or guarding their nest holes against intruders. This pair (the female's the one on the left with the brown, rather than blue, cere (the horny patch across the top of the beak)) were outside their nest, which, if it had been on the south, rather than the north, side would have been in the shadow of Uluru (that pinky brown background is Uluru's flank). I think that the female must already have eggs as you can see the 'parting' in her belly feathers from where she's been incubating:

Budgerigars weren't the only 'cage and aviary birds' that I saw in the Green Centre. In several places I saw zebra finches, and, although I never saw any nests, I saw them collecting nesting material on several occasions so they, too, were busy breeding:

It's no coincidence that the birds that I saw nesting in the Green Centre are common 'cage and aviary birds'. Both budgerigars and zebra finches are ecologically adapted to breedng in near-desert conditions. Both of them are seed-eaters, and rather than being tied to breeding at a particular time of year, breed in reponse to favourable conditions - rainfall that produces a flush of seeding grasses. Their seed diet and willingness to breed at any time of year are what makes them easy to keep - and breed - in captivity.

Australian icon

If I had to choose one word to describe Uluru (Ayers Rock), I think it would have to be incongruous. Especially when the view doesn't include the ground around the base of the rock, it looks as though it's been photoshopped into the landscape:



The same could be said of its colour when I arrived, but a little later the sun had come out and it had returned to its more usual colour:

However, the skies clouded over again, so that when I joined the scores of other tourists at the viewing site at sunset, the rock only glimmered faintly orange ...

... before going out, ...

... although those who turned their camera the other way were treated to a subtle display of pink and blue after the sun had set:

The same was true in the morning ...

... when the waiting crowds were greeted by overcast skies ...

... but again some compensations in the other direction:

Uluru always looks to me as though it is a long oval shape, and if I was being irreverent I would say that it was a naked mole rate dreaming:

(c) Someone else

But in fact the Rock is roughly triangular:

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The Rock is made of sandstone formed 550 million years ago - when the first multi-cellular organisms were evolving - as a range of granite mountains to the west eroded and the sand formed an alluvial fan on the plain. About 400 million years ago the rocks were subjected to massive forces, and the layers of rock were tilted almost 90 degrees, so that Uluru is the edge of a slab that is stood on its ear and continues for several kilometers down into the ground. The ground around the base of the Rock is about 550 meters above sea level, and the summit of the Rock stands about 330 meters (1,000 feet) above that. It's a little over 3 kilometers in length, and the walk around the base is getting on for 10 kilometers.

After my abortive sunrise photography, I headed to the carpark at the north-east corner of Uluru to start the walk around the base. This is also where the route up the Rock starts - a hair-raising climb up the crest of a steep ridge clinging to a chain on metal poles:

(Photo taken previous afternoon)

The climb up the rock is contentious: Uluru is a sacred place in aboriginal culture, and only aborigine men ever climb the rock, and only on special occasions. They would prefer that visitors don't climb the rock, and ask them not to do so:

The whole situation is complicated - not least because the land has now been returned to its aboriginal owners, who gain income from it by leasing it back to the government. Tour operators believe, rightly or wrongly, that tourists would be less interested in visiting if they weren't allowed to climb the Rock, with the unsatisfactory consequence that foreign tour operators often present climbing the Rock as a highlight of the tour, and don't mention that the aboriginal owners would prefer that tourists don't do this. This also leads to disappointment when the climb is closed for safety reasons - as it was when I was there. I have to say that I wasn't disappointed.

The climb closed or not, there were cars in the car park, and Australian ravens laying claim to their pitch ...

... and entertaining anyone who happened to be watching:

The walk around the base of the Rock offers some magnificient rockscapes ...

... including permanent waterholes that are fed by water cascading off the rock when it rains:

Many of the rock features around the base of the rock are sacred aboriginal sites - to the extent that tourists are asked not to photograph specific places - because they represent tales from the dreamtime. One of the stories involves Kuniya, a python, and a group of Liru (poisonous snakes). Kuniya's nephew had enraged a group of Liru, who followed him and exacted revenge by spearing him to death. Kuniya in turn struck one of the Liru twice with her digging stick, killing him. The traces of the two blows can be seen in the rockface ...

... and Kuniya guards the spot, her head resting on her coiled body:

The shelters around the base of the rock contain aboriginal paintings, but these are unlike the ones on Kakadu, being much more symbolic representations. For example, the concentric circles represent campsites:

Of course, there were plenty of signs of the unusually wet weather, including this fungus pushing its way up through the hard ground:

and this striking red seeding grass:



and a yellow flower beginning to go to seed:

There was also a mauve flowering pea:

and another hibsicus (or maybe the same species as at King's Canyon):

Lastly, this flower is, I think, my favourite in the Green Centre:

Who could resist its architectural elegance?

I guess most people visiting Uluru go to see the Rock glowing orange in the low sunrays of sunrise or sunset (if not to climb the Rock). In that respect, my visit was a complete grey-out, but the unusual weather also meant that I saw things that I wouldn't have seen in a typically hot dry year, and that my experience was more personal. There are many reasons that I would like to visit the Red Centre again, but seeing Uluru in its iconic colours isn't chief among them.