Wilvis

This is me patting a camel… it wasn’t wombat (the camel that carried us)… he seemed a little anti-social.

The camels are pretty funny… they all made noises before we got on them to try and scare us off riding them. They then walked pretty slowly on the trip out to the lookout but once it came to the return trip home they picked up speed.

The cameleer that took us out told us that on average a camel can drink 210L of water in 10 minutes and that they drink every chance they get. They’ve can smell water from a distance and have been known to rip open people’s air conditioners because they can smell the moisture.

Yep… another shot of Uluru in the middle of the day. It had been overcast for the past 2 days which made the rock look really dull. Well the clouds are all gone and the rock is back to it’s bright red best.
It’s one of those things that you sort of can’t believe… every time you look at it you want to take another photo because it’s so much larger than life…

We rode the camels from the station at Yulara and did a loop around part of Ayers Rock Resort. We stopped at one of the lookouts on the outskirts of the resort and to watch the sunrise.

This is a part of Uluru that has been weathered away at the base of the rock. Rocks coming out of the wall look like faces.
The story goes that a rival tribe called the Mulgas cast a spell and sent a devil dog to attack the Mala tribe. Many of the Mala tribe fleed the rock however five men stayed behind to protect the Mala escape. It’s said that these five rocks are those five men and that they stay there to keep watch over the Mala people.

This is another shot of a camel.

Meet Wombat the Camel! Wombat wasn’t terribly enthusiastic to carry us… in fact he let us know how unhappy he was about it before he let us onboard. Personally I don’t blame him… I really wouldn’t like the idea of carrying two people on my back either

I’d have to say that this was one of the highlights of our trip. We were taken by tour bus to the camel station at Ayers Rock Resort where we started with a quick talk about camels.
It turns out they were bought to Australia because horses just couldn’t handle the hot desert conditions. The early settlers bought out Afghan Cameleers and Camels to explore central Australia and for the construction of the Adelaide to Darwin telegraph line. Once the Ghan was build the railroad made the camels redundant. The government of the day decided that camels were now a pest and that they should be put down. The government ordered the cameleers to take their camels into the desert and shoot them. Most of the cameleers thought of the camels as pets in the same way we think of our dogs as pets and refused to put them down. Instead they took them out into the desert and released them. Now instead of having 10,000 camels in Australia they have multiplied and there are over 1 million feral camels!!!

We spent a few hours walking around the base of Uluru. From most of the pictures you see you think it’s just a big rock in the middle of the desert but there’s a lot more to it.
It’s about a 10km trip around the base of the rock and there’s a heap of these holes in the sides. Geologists aren’t sure how they were made but think they are due to erosion – either water seeped out of the rock over time (it used to be an inland sea) and washed out these sections or water flowed around the rock and washed out these sections.
The aborigines have a more interesting story about a ‘marsupial mole’. The mother mole dug a big hole at the top of Uluru and her children dug out the smaller holes.
There’s also five watering holes around the base of Uluru. When it rains water gets held at the top of the rocks and it falls down the sides and fills the watering holes.

This is the sort of shot you’re used to seeing in the travel brochures. Bright blue skies without a cloud in sight and the giant rock uluru in all of it’s redness.
There’s been a lot of rain in central Australia this year… well compared the normal rainfall in central Australia anyways. This has seen a lot of spinifex growing all over the territory.
This was our second day at Uluru and we signed up for a free tour with the park ranger at 10am. It was an awesome tour as the ranger talked a lot about both the European, Aboriginal, and geological history of the area.
The name Uluru itself doesn’t mean anything – it’s the name of one of the Aboriginal families that has a claim to the rock. The aboriginal people of this area are known as the Mala people and they work with the parks department to allow access to the rock whilst at the same time maintaining some of their traditional practices.
When we first left Brisbane I was very keen to climb the rock. As of 2010 the rock climb will be closed. After doing the ranger led tour I decided not to do the climb out of respect for the traditional owners and for the environment. For me it’s a combination of climbing all over a sacred aboriginal site, the erosion, and pollution of the rock.

Having checked into the Lost Camel we decided to take a drive out to Uluru. It was a 5 minute drive to the entrance to the park and we’ve bought a three day pass for $25 each. The money collected from the pass goes to the local community who manage Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) and the local parklands.
It’s pretty late in the afternoon – about 4pm – so we drove around and sussed out where everything was.
One of the first stops we passed was a Sunset viewing platform. The good thing about the Sunset viewing platform is that it faces the sunset. As the sun goes down and the different reds and oranges come out of the sunset the colour of Uluru changes. In the photo above the rock appears purplish – this is largely due to the cloud cover and the lowish sun in the behind the photo which brings out the blues in the rock.