March 30, 2011

After another late night blogging session it was hard for the author to get up at 5:30. All the luggage had been prepared in the evening, but the kids were very difficult to get up and we ended up running short on time. In addition I suddenly realized that we hadn’t checked out yesterday and that the small reception seemed to have very limited opening times. A quick sortie into the darkness confirmed my fear. Oh well, at least they had my credit card details to secure the booking. I would have to call them later in the day.

Tension mounted as the clock continued ticking. In the end Helene brought the last bags to the car and the kids followed her. She left it to me to do my ritual checking of all the rooms before leaving. I am a quite absent-minded person and have been known to forget stuff in inconvenient places. Whenever I leave a temporary place of residence I always do the rounds and check under all beds, chairs, tables and couches. I open all drawers and closets and inspect any cavity or surface which could possibly hold any of our belongings. This ritual may seem overly pedantic, but it has saved me from forgetting a number of valuable objects over the years.

Now, the only problem this time was that everyone else had left. I normally ask everyone questions, “Have you remembered to bring this or that object?” Helene probably thinks it’s a pain, but I hate forgetting things. Now, in addition, Helene and I are quite incompatible when it comes to how much margin you should have for an appointment or a plane. I like to cut it thin and not waste my valuable time waiting unnecessarily in airports. Helene, on the other hand, wants to have a very wide margin just in case a tire goes flat on the way to the airport and there is huge unexpected traffic jam, and flooding has blocked the highway, so we need to take a 50 km detour. You get the picture.

My personal record in catching a plane is 14 minutes. I was once outside Hong Kong Airport 14 minutes before the flight to Los Angeles was to leave. I have to admit my luggage was checked in and that I had extensively studied the map of the airport to know exactly where I had to go. I was waiting for a sample of a competing product to our own, which a guy placed in my hand 14 minutes before the flight time. It wasn’t supposed to be that late. I was in constant telephonic contact with the guy and he claimed he was minutes away from the airport when he wasn’t. His pleas of “wait just a little bit more” went home with me.

I had my back-pack opened (any respectable Norwegian business man uses a back-pack on business travel) and immediately put it in, put the back-pack on, said thanks to the guy, and started sprinting into the airport. Holding 100 meter dash speed and screaming “I have a flight in 14 minutes!” does wonders to the line at security check. I was quickly allowed to go to the front of the line and had a nerve-wrecking minute as I waited for the back-pack to come through the x-ray machine. I sprinted on and down the stairs to the shuttle train. It was there, and as I jumped in, the doors closed behind me. Gotta have some luck. 2 minutes later I set a new personal record in stair climbing as I made my way to the terminal. My gate was the very first one. A woman was anxiously waiting at the gate. She was desperately calling my name. I gave her my ticket and whizzed past her down towards the plane. I boarded 7 minutes before the scheduled flight time and they literally closed the door behind me. I was sweating like a pig and very short-breathed as I made my way down the aisle. A lot of people were staring at me. “There’s the guy who held up the plane” I fell down into my seat and realized that I was going to sit still there for 14 hours. Total anti-climax. I wasn’t very proud at the time, neither did I converse much with the grumpy old lady sitting next to me. But still, 14 minutes and outside the airport. Beat that!

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, my questions to the others. I was thinking I should ask the kids if they had their iPods and everything else, but I couldn’t. I also realized that I couldn’t lock the door and hand in the keys at the reception, since there was no one there. I decided the safest thing to do was to leave the keys on the table and then lock the door using the button on the inside of the door handle as I left. I did not want to risk someone coming into the apartment and stealing the keys. Remember that I had had very little sleep and that my brain was mainly occupied with looking forward to getting some more sleep on the plane. I remember thinking that it would not be funny if we had forgotten something inside as I locked the door.

I ran over to the others and we headed for the airport in our rental car. After a few hundred meters Iseline asked “but where is my iPod?” I had handed them out once they got up, as I always do on days we travel. Iseline had put hers on the couch. After my thorough checking of the apartment there was only one explanation, it must have fallen between the cracks of the couch pillows. The only place I hadn’t looked, of course. I told Helene I had locked the door, feeling slightly stupid.

We still headed back and I could do nothing but conclude that there was no way we could get in. The windows were all well shut. Bummer. We had no choice but go to the airport.

Our flight to Sydney was on a Boeing 737-800:

Once in Sydney I managed to call the reception for the apartments and organize both payment of our bill and tell them about the iPod. They would check the room and I could call them later.

Our next leg was our flight to Uluru. This time in an Embraer 190:

Geographically it was not a very logical traveling route, but flights to Uluru only go from Sydney, Perth, Cairns and Alice Springs. We could go direct to Alice Springs from Melbourne, but flight connections were terrible and the price sky high. We looked into renting a car in Alice Springs since the two places seem really close on the map of Australia. It turned out the driving distance between the two is 440 km (270 miles)!

The control tower at the Sydney airport is a cool structure:

We got some great views of Sydney from the air:

and soon we only saw red, dry and flat land with the occasional river flowing through:

The flight from Sydney covered a distance of 2177 km (1350 miles) and took 3 hours and 35 minutes. We had gone from the eastern coast to more or less the center of Australia. This s a big country.

Closer to Uluru there was a bit more green vegetation. It has been raining abnormally much in Australia this season, even in the center of the country.

Then we could see the rock:

No wonder it has had spiritual significance for a very long time. In all this flatness, suddenly a red enormous rock reaches for the sky.

We could also see Kata Tjuta (aka The Olgas), Uluru’s lesser known sister rocks:

The sign at the airport welcomed us to the “Ayers Rock resort:”

Uluru is the aboriginal name of the rock. It was officially called Ayers Rock until 1993, when it was renamed Ayers Rock / Uluru. In 2002 the order was changed and it was named Uluru / Ayers Rock. Most maps we saw, e.g. the one in the airline magazine, simply use Uluru. A symbolic win for the aboriginals.

In the early 1970s tourism was starting to have a significant impact on the environment around Uluru. Developers had been operating as they pleased and there were even motels close to the rim of Uluru itself. The government of Australia acted and decided to move all tourist operations to an area 14 kilometers away, this is now the town of Yulara. The town is in fact a tourist resort, which was fully operational in late 1984.

In 1984 all the leases for motels in other areas were terminated by the government and the area was cleaned up and brought back to it’s natural state by the national parks service. This was also the year when the park was renamed to Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park and was finally handed over to the traditional owners of the area, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, collectively referred to as the Anangu.

The land right dispute had been going on for decades. The process can be traced back to 1968 when Yolngu people took the Nabalco mining compant to court to protest their building a bauxite mine on their territory. The case was finally decided by the supreme court of the Nothern Territory in 1971, in a ruling that says a lot about Australian society’s views on aboriginals at the time. Incredibly the court ruled that aboriginals in general do not have any land rights in Australia. First there was no provision in the law of Australia for native land rights. Secondly it had not been proven that aboriginal traditional law allows for land posession and thirdly if aboriginals had had rights to the land it was now way too late to claim them!

The ruling was so evidently absurd that it became a symbol of injustice towards the aboriginals and an issue in the 1972 elections. The labor party won and a commission was established to look at aboriginal land rights. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed in 1976, after the conservatives were back in power. The act gave aboriginals the right to claim land if they could prove their traditional usage of the land. This in turn opened for the Anangu to claim Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

The national park was crown land, meaning that it belonged to the central government and not the local Northern Territory government. The local government reacted in fury when negotiations were started. Incredibly they started a national campaign to stop the handover. The chief minister, Ian Tuxworth, toured Australian cities and they used AUD 200 000 to run full page ads in newspapers proclaiming “THE ROCK BELONGS TO ALL AUSTRALIANS! (AND ALWAYS HAS).” The ads also claimed: “It places in the hands of just a few that which belongs to all Australians: Ayers Rock, the heart of this country.”

A political journalist went as far as to claim that this was apartheid in reverse and that no whites would now be allowed to enter the national park. This was of course nonsense.

On October 26, 1985 the land rights to the park was handed over to the Ananju people in a ceremony which the Northern Territory government boycotted. One of the representatives of the aboriginals, Yami Lester,  said with humour:  “I welcome the Governor General this afternoon. He’s able to come here today to see the rock. By tomorrow the rock will be missing, the Aboriginal people are going to take it away.” (Yami, btw. was blinded from fallout from a British nuclear test in Australia when he was 12, and has been active in working for aboriginal rights for most of his life)

5 minutes after the handover the aboriginals leased the park back to the National Parks and Wildlife agency for 99 years. Up until the very end it was part of the deal that it would be forbidden to climb Uluru, but this was changed by the government in the last moment. Uluru and Kata Tjuta are very sacred sites for the Anangu and there are signs everywhere saying “Please do not climb Uluru.” Unfortunately over 30% of visitors still do.

Uhm, where was I. Yeah, at the airport we got our rental car and were quite stunned by the heat as we walked out to the parking lot. What a contrast to Melbourne. There were also a lot of flies around. It didn’t take long to find out that these were not like the common Norwegian houseflies. Nope, these were more the telemarketers of the fly world. They would not take no for an answer and kept on bugging us relentlessly. The main problem was that they insisted on sitting on skin all the time. Once they were brushed away, they just came back again immediately.

Luckily we are well prepared travelers and got out the mosquito net hats we had bought for the Amazon, but almost never used there. Here we are, minus the photographer, at the main pedestrian square of Yulara:

We have become really lax in our planning now. While the Cook Islands part of the trip was mostly booked 6 months in advance we did our Uluru bookings while in Melbourne. We were lucky and got a 50% last moment discount on a nice 3 room apartment. It’s a risky sport though, in high season we would probably not have found anything. Uluru is one of the must-do destinations in Australia. Interestingly enough I found two different websites with online booking for the same apartments. One offered the 50% discount, the other didn’t. Always do a Google search with the name of the hotel/apartment you want to book before handing over your money.

I got hold of the apartment reception in Melbourne on the phone. They had found the iPod between the couch pillows and would send it to our friends in Brisbane! They were impressed by my accurate pinpointing of its location. Iseline was VERY happy when she found out. In the morning she had first taken the incident very lightly, but when we explained that if it was gone now she would never get it back, she understood the graveness of the situation.

It was still early in the day and after offloading our baggage we drove into the national park and bought our entrance tickets at the gate. Look at the last line down to the left:

Our goal was Kata Tjuta, a 40 minute drive from Yulara:

As we approached we got a nice overview. The sediments that formed Kata Tjuta are different from those that formed Uluru, but were deposited at the same time, about 550 million years ago. Australia is sometimes known as the oldest continent, since there has been very little geological activity for the last 100 million years (when the supercontinent Gondwana broke up). A hundred million years of erosion has made Australia the flattest continent on earth, making geological artifacts like Uluru and Kata Tjuta very rare.

Iseline has started bringing drawing paper and crayons wherever we go. She makes drawings of things we see, much like the travelers of the 19th century who took the famous Grand Tour of Europe. Here is her impression of Kata Tjuta:

and here is Iseline proudly showing her drawing:

We decided to first walk into the Walpa Gorge and back and then do parts of the Valley of the Winds walk:

Ready to enter the gorge:

Given the very large rainfall this year, compared to normal, we were told that all the green vegetation surrounding us was very unusual. It gave a beautiful touch to the color of the place. The lush green, together with the red mountains and the clear blue sky created a fantastic color contrast. It was difficult to stop taking photos:

We’re so used to seeing mountains created by uplifted continental plates which are eroded by wind and water. Here the erosion causes are the same, but he mountains are formed because of differences of hardness of rocks. In essence the soft parts are eroded away, while the hard parts are left behind. This creates some unusual structures and patterns:

We carried plenty of water, which came in very handy:

Kata Tjuta consists of a mixture of many types of rocks. The red color comes from oxidation of minerals containing iron:

The gorge became narrower:

This place was also important to the aboriginals because the structures retain water, and although the water holes are not permanent, water can be found here when most other places are dry.

After a while we reached the end of the trail, walking outside it is strictly prohibited. Here is the view from the endpoint:

We headed back:

We reached the car and drove a bit further to do parts of the Valley of the Winds walk. Impressively there was a very large tank of excellent drinking water, free for everyone, at the parking lot. We had done without the nets until now, but the flies did not give us any peace. We put the nets on, thankful that we had them:

The last time I used such head nets was when Helene and I did our honeymoon hike on Finnmarksvidda way up north in Norway. The mosquitoes there are world famous for their size and immense numbers. The choice of grazing areas for reindeer up there is actually based on when the mosquitoes arrive. As soon as they do rein herders bring their reindeer to the coast, where there are no mosquitoes. After a couple of days of hiking I got so used to the net I didn’t even notice it was there. That was all fine and dandy until I did the fatal mistake. While we were hiking I decided I needed to get rid of some saliva. So I collected up a good quantity with my tongue and forcefully spat it all out in one go. Not prettty, the sort of thing you only do once.

The beauty of the landscape impressed us all, and I cannot resist showing you some more photos of it:

We stopped when we reached a very nice vista point:

We wanted to be back in time for the famous sunset view of Kata Tjuta and walked back again:

Iseline was getting tired and needed some help. Here is the artist, complete with mosquito net, drawing while sitting on her sherpa’s shoulder:

They were all pretty tired when we arrived at the parking lot:

We waited in anticipation for the sunset:

During the last few seconds of light, just before the sun disappears, both Uluru and Kata Tjuta change color to a bright red we had been told. While we were waiting Iseline drew the Eiffel tower:

First the color changed a little:

Then the solar disc started disappearing:

Then Kata Tjuta became red:

Really red:

There were some nice colors in the direction of the sun also:

In a few minutes it was all over. We headed back to our apartment, tired from traveling and hiking, and once again full of impressions. Tomorrow we will walk around Uluru.

 

Eirik

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