Our new friends the clouds welcomed us on this chilly morning in the usually hot, red centre of Australia. Today they at least didn’t rain down on us and so our Groovy Grape Tours group set out for the Uluru base walk after gathering our strength with a feast of pancakes. The walk takes about 3.5 hours but with all the photographs that we took of the spectacular natural monument that is the Uluru, it took us longer than that. Having learned the emu and kangaroo dance at the aboriginal dance before, we tried out our new “expertise” and cheekily posed in front of the Uluru. We didn’t dance, however.
This post came to be by being on this tour free of charge to cover it. I wasn’t paid.
It is a very special site for the aboriginal Anangu people and their creation stories (tjukurrpa) are not for white people to know and so we only got tiny portions of them about warriors and a python lady and saw the marks they left for everyone to see even up until today.
The creation stories often contain a moral message, such as don’t steal or lie. Each part of the Uluru has a story attached to it and natural markings, such as holes, streaks and colour changes open up world’s of meaning to aboriginal men and women (depending on whose ‘business’ it is).
Sobering from our silliness, we also learned about the holiness of this place.
Unlike the well-known images of it suggest, it is not actually round and smooth but stretches out here and there, like little arms with lots of crevasses and ridges. The colour also is not actually red but grey and can be seen along the edges of water holes.
The black streaks are actually lichen that thrives on the rain, which we had witnessed the day before. After we had done our couple of hours walk and were driving North to our next destination, Kings Canyon, we were lucky enough to see a group of brambies (wild horses).
We got to see the women’s kitchen cave, the boy’s teaching caves, for instance.
I was in utter fascination about this rock in the middle of nowhere.
Australian roadtrips are truly the best and you never know what cool things you might see.
I would like to thank Groovy Grape Tours for taking me along on their different tours. However, as always I am staying true to my opinion.
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