Day 68: 20231130 Thursday, November 30, 2023 Uluru sunrise and base walk
Our alarm clocks got us up to prepare for our sunrise excursion. Fortunately, we will be back for breakfast, and didn’t need to fool around with packing up our stuff back into suitcases. Only 2 in our tour group opted to sleep in and skip the sunrise viewing. The coach took us back into the national park where there is a specified viewing area for tour buses separate from where people arriving in passenger cars can go. We did have a nice clear view of Uluru. When we arrived at about 5:30am, twilight was already illuminating the sky so that only the nearly full moon and Venus were visible. We had thunderstorms booming around the resort during the night, but by morning, the clouds overhead had cleared but on the horizon there was moderate cloud cover.
Ben set up his GoPro to shoot a time lapsed movie while individual shots were taken with the Canon M50 and iPhone. It was very peaceful and beautiful watching the sunrise but it was more like someone slowly turning up a dimmer switch than anything otherworldly because the cloud cover on the horizon was probably preventing the sun’s rays from directly hitting Uluru. But we can check sunset and sunrise at Uluru off the bucket list.
The buffet breakfast was good, although not quite up to the Hyatt Regency’s buffet or the Horizon Court for that matter. But it was leaps and bounds better than the Best Western Plus, or anything we would have bother to make for ourselves at home.
After breakfast, we reboarded our tour coach and headed back into Uluru National Park to do drive around the base of Uluru, do a short walk to see petroglyphs and a watering hole, and visit the Cultural Center. Of note is while driving around the base of Uluru, one face is considered sacred, so no photography or video is allowed, even from a car or bus. They consider it sacred scripture that can only be viewed in person and with permission of the Anangu people. This particular face has several very notable features presumably created by erosion forces creating some very interesting looking caves. One area looked like a silhouette of a face with the skull cut open to expose all the wrinkles of the brain. When so much of the face of Uluru is solid sandstone with a fairly smooth surface, these features are quite eye catching. If you google “forbidden photos of the backside of Uluru” you might find this: Uluru-Stories-1.jpeg
When the bus finally stopped, we got out and walked up to the base of Uluru where we could actually touch the stone. It is such an enormous monolith that it is quite humbling to stand at the base and look up at its face in person. We had a similar experience rafting down the Grand Canyon.
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There is a cave within easy flat walking distance from the parking lot that is full of colorful Aboriginal petroglyphs. These, like the paintings contemporary Aboriginal artists, tell stories of births, deaths, hunts and other events.
Around the corner from the petroglyph caves is a pool of water that collects after rainstorms called the Mutitjulu Waterhole. There was a trickle of water into the hole from last night’s storms. The water was surprisingly clear and had some good sized tadpoles swimming about.
Our next stop was the Uluru cultural center which houses interpretive displays, videos, and cultural demonstrations. We were scheduled for a cultural presentation by an a pair of Aboriginal Elders. Unfortunately, our demonstration slot had been double booked so we had to sit outside in the sun to watch our demonstration. The Elders were a married couple. It’s apparent that the Australian government doesn’t provide dental care for the Aboriginal tribes people because the elders are quite nearly toothless as a whole. They had an array of spears and other tools out in front of them. They spoke very little to us, but did most of their communication via a white Aussie employee, who also acted out all the physical actions of demonstrating how the boomerang, digging stick, spears and atlatl were used.
In general they did not allow any photography or video inside the cultural center, but our guide got us special permission to take pictures of our group’s demonstration and pictures with the elders.
We were back at the resort hotel by noon and had the rest of the afternoon and evening free. We, of course, started by taking naps to make up for having gotten up at 4am. Then it was time to relax by the pool for a bit.
In the afternoon the winds had picked up to 25mph with gusts to 41mph but that helped with the 97˚F 20% humidity. There was a brief squall that dumped some rain on us, but then the weather cleared up.
In the afternoon we got notification that Price and Ciara’s flight out of Vancouver got delayed by a bit, but they had no troubles getting from Sea-Tac to Vancouver or checking in their luggage. We are having them bring extra roller suitcases to put our overweight items in since we have a 2 checked bag allowance for our return flight to the US.
We walked to the Outback Pioneer Hotel, which is part of the resort complex and a 15 minute walk from our hotel's lobby. There is a free resort shuttle that drives in circles around the resort every 20-30 minutes, but it was pulling out just as we approached our hotel lobby. The temperatures had dropped to 80˚F with a light wind by dinner time, so we thought we'd check out the BBQ restaurant there. When we got there, we were surprised to see that the "restaurant" was a meat counter that sold sausages and various cuts of meat out of a refrigerated case, and off to the side of this was a bank of electric griddles where you would cook your own meat. There was a "Vegetarian" case with salad bar, corn on the cob and rolls. But even the least expensive pork sausages were 3 for $34, a chicken breast was $36, and most of the steaks and chops were $34 and up. At those prices, you would expect them to cook it to order and plate it with some fancy sides.
So instead of eating at the Outback Pioneer Hotel, we took a stroll up to the Pioneer lookout that is on a hill behind that hotel. From the top of the hill, we could see both Uluru and Kata Tujta in the distance. The sky was clearing overhead but there were still some bands of clouds in the distance. It may be possible to get a clear view of the southern horizon if the clouds clear up tonight.
We walked back to the Outback Pioneer Hotel's lobby and caught the resort shuttle this time and rode it past our hotel to the town square where there is an IGA grocery store. We picked up a whole roasted chicken, garlic naan, and potato chips (crisps here) for dinner for less than the cost of a single hamburger order at the Gecko cafe next door.
We then got back on the Resort Shuttle and rode it all the way around the resort. There are a lot of employees of the resort that live on site and ride this shuttle to and from work. One of the waitresses that was bringing us appetizers last night got on the bus at one of the employee residential stops and rode it to our hotel where we all got off.
After sunset, Ben walked back to the Pioneer lookout with a headlamp and discovered that although the sky was clear and there were plenty of stars visible, the Southern Cross or Crux constellation was below the southern horizon and wouldn't rise above the horizon until midnight. So, although the Southern Cross is so prominent in the Australian and New Zealand culture and flag, it is rather elusive. It is unlike the Big Dipper and Polaris which are visible every night of the year if the sky is clear, and a dependable north reference, the Southern Cross's main claim to fame must be more that it can only be seen in the southern hemisphere (when it decides to be visible) and although it is a southern reference point, it is not always visible like Polaris is in the north.
Tomorrow morning, we are scheduled for a camel ride. It sounds like we will just be riding camels within sight of Uluru rather than riding the camels around Uluru, but we’ll see what happens. We are then scheduled to leave for the airport at 10am to fly back to Sydney. Price and Ciara will probably beat us to Sydney, but they’ll be pretty jet lagged from the flight.
