A sacred site for Aborigines, Uluru – aka Ayers Rock – is also an increasingly big draw for visitors. Hours even from Alice Springs, it stands in a national park whose towering sandstone will leave you in awe, writes PAUL CULLEN
FOR A PLACE that has built its name on hard-to-get-to middle-of- nowhereness, this is a pretty strange sight. Here I am, having travelled 16,000km to Australia’s supposedly remote Red Centre, and what do I find but hundreds of other visitors milling around in the desert.
Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, is the reason we are here. A gigantic loaf-shaped chunk of red sandstone standing proud of a boundless and empty plain, the mountain is emblematic of Australia and one of the natural wonders of the world.
It is dusk, and the heat of the day is finally starting to abate. A ripple of excitement runs through the crowd; the mountain’s daily performance is about to begin. As the sun’s rays descend to the vertical, the colour of the imposing sandstone monolith starts to change. Forty shades of ochre, orange and brown are wrung out in the space of a quarter-hour. The crowd oohs and aahs as each new hue is drawn from the rock until, finally, at sunset, its bulk descends into silhouette.
It sounds corny. In the 1960s maybe 5,000 people a year came here to visit; today numbers have jumped to 400,000. The visitors quaff sparkling wine served by their tour guides and relentlessly snap the unfolding spectacle. The tour buses are revving up within minutes of the arrival of nightfall, heedless of the stars now starting to shine.
But never mind the mass tourism. This remains a stupendous event, with the rock in the starring role it has held for hundreds of millions of years. You’ve probably seen 100 orange-hued photos of Ayers Rock in books and on postcards, yet witnessing sunset at the mountain still has enormous wonder-inducing powers.
The same goes for the night sky that emerges once darkness falls. Only in the lightless Australian outback could you witness such a proliferation of stars, the clear line of the Milky Way, the axis of our own galaxy piercing the heavens and the constellations delineated as they must have been to the ancients, long before cities and pollution got in the way.
Stargazing certainly beats worrying about being eaten by dingoes, a thought that flitted through my mind as I lay that night in the bush in a swag, a kind of sleeping bag with a small mattress within. With only a campfire for protection I fretted about the myriad unwelcome visitors lurking in the darkness. Australians delight in scaring squeamish visitors with tales of biting, stinging and swallowing wildlife, so there was a long list to go through.
On our first night here we came across a six-metre python on a suburban street, so heaven knows what slithery relations might inhabit the desert. At Ayers Rock our hotel was wrestling with an invasion of crickets, and this followed earlier invasions of centipedes and locusts. Then there was the “sneaky” crocodile wreaking havoc in the suburbs of Alice Springs, as reported by the local paper. I won’t mention the flies, except to say they are the same as at home, only far more numerous.
Incongruously, camels are some of the main mischief-makers. They were brought here from India and Pakistan in the 19th century, prized for their staying power in such parched terrain, then tossed aside when the motor car came along. Now the outback is home to more than a million camels, and they can wreak huge damage; recently a herd rampaged through a settlement, pulling cisterns off toilets and ripping air-conditioning pipes from walls in a frenzied search for water.
My thoughts turned next to the outsized beetles and spiders we had seen on our travels, and I fell to wondering whether kangaroos really boxed. Next thing I knew I was waking at dawn after a solid night’s sleep, undisturbed by any nocturnal visitors.
When the white man first ventured into the red centre of Australia, in the late 19th century, it took weeks and months to penetrate the interior. Roads and infrastructure have improved since then, but even now you can travel an entire day on red-dirt tracks through the outback and find you have moved no farther than a fingernail’s width on the map. Ayers Rock is 1,500km from the sea and the nearest big city.
The rock is paired in the popular imagination with the nearest town, Alice Springs, but in fact Alice is a three-hour drive away. It started life as a way station on the new telegraph route laid down to connect the settlements in south Australia with Darwin and Britain. Lying in the geographical centre of Australia, it was for many years nothing more than a tiny outpost in the wilderness of the outback.
Anyone visiting today and expecting the epitome of remoteness is liable to be disappointed. These days Alice is a thriving town of about 25,000 people, replete with shopping malls and fast-food joints. There’s a boom in uranium, oil and gas, thousands workinaUSsatellite-trackingstation,
and the price of property has rocketed. Tourism remains the biggest industry, though, and the town claims to have more art galleries for its size than any other town in the world.
Temperatures here average more than 35 degrees, and Alice can go for years without rainfall. The definition of a local is someone who has seen water in the Todd river in the town three times; exceptionally, this has happened within the past year, to the great relief of the population.
Alice is also home to the original base of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and the achievements of this remarkable service are recounted in a museum in the town.
The first paved road in these parts was built as recently as the 1980s, but these days there’s a circuit of paved roads to take you to Uluru and the equally astounding rock formation known as the Olgas – properly, Kata Tjuta.
Another worthwhile diversion is to Kings Canyon, in Watarrka National Park, where you can do a stunning three-hour walk of the rim and top it off with a cooling swim in a natural water hole.
It’s a busy enough stop on the tourist circuit, but away from the main sights the Australian outback is still a tremendously empty place where you can travel for hours without seeing another car.
Like the ubiquitous ochre sand that coats your skin, gets into your shoes and invades every orifice, the country seeps into your pores as you put down the kilometres. When Australia is hot it’s off the scale; when it’s dry there isn’t a drop for years; and its unique collection of native animals and plants is unrivalled in the world.
As a traveller you go through many places, but Australia, in all its vastness and fierceness, goes through you.
Go there
Qantas (qantas.com) flies to Ayers Rock Airport from Sydney. Qantas, Etihad (etihad airways.com), British Airways (ba.com) and Virgin Atlantic (virgin-atlantic.com) fly to Sydney from Ireland and London via their hubs.
Where to stay while visiting Uluru
Longitude 131°. 00-61-8- 89577131, longitude131.com.au. The accommodation closest to Uluru, this five-star tented option offers private views of the sun rising and setting over the rock while dinner is served under the stars. Children under 13 are not catered for. Prices start at €2,173 for two people for two nights, including meals, drinks, tours and transfers.
Sails in the Desert. 00-61-8- 89577417, ayersrockresort.com. au/sails. Sprawling five-star hotel with a few restaurants and a pool. You’ll be glad of the air con after a day in the outback. Expect to pay €320 to €390 for room for two.
Outback Pioneer Hotel Lodge. 00-61-8-89577605, ayersrockresort.com.au/ outback. The budget option at Ayers Rock Resort (though there is also a campsite), the hotel offers “three-and-a-half- star” accommodation. Budget rooms cost €145-€160; a standard room is €220-€290.
To climb on not to climb?
Climbing Uluru isn’t prohibited but is heavily discouraged. A number of disparate reasons are given to discourage would-be alpinists (although, at 346m – higher than the Eiffel Tower but lower than the Empire State Building – Uluru isn’t going to give you altitude sickness).
Most are cultural: since 1985 the area in which the mountain lies has been returned to local Aboriginal peoples, for whom the climb has great spiritual significance as a route taken by their ancestors.
Safety reasons are also cited: at least 35 people have died on the climb, and many others have been injured. The climb is steep and can be slippery and windy, and it is also very hot at any time of year.
Environmentally, too, the number of climbers has taken its toll, because there are no toilet facilities on the mountain and no soil to dig a hole. As a result, park rangers close the climb when the weather is too extreme. The day we visited it was closed because of high winds. Temperatures over 36 degrees, recent rain and low cloud are also reasons for blocking access. As a result, the mountain had been open for just 10 days over the preceding six months. Anyone caught climbing the peak against the wishes of the park ranger can be fined up to €300, we were told.
It came as a surprise, therefore, when our guide confessed to having climbed the mountain himself. Pleading boredom and a desire to see what he was telling tourists about, he said he had ventured up one day. “It’s not illegal,” he told us, rather defensively, “even if it is culturally insensitive.” Later, perhaps regretting his moment of candour, he asked us not to use his name in anything we wrote.
Climbing the mountain might be a no-no, but buzzing around the peak in a helicopter or light aeroplane seems to be acceptable. A 20-minute trip above Uluru in a six-seater plane costs about €60. There are also a variety of walking tours around the base of the mountain; the full circumference takes about three hours.
Australia’s tourism industry, conscious perhaps of the historical misdeeds of recent centuries, encourages visitors to learn about the history and customs of the country’s indigenous peoples. Visitors to Ayers Rock are also encouraged to visit the cultural centre, which provides an introduction to Aboriginal culture and customs, and arguably the best reasons not to climb the mountain: the display features a “sorry book” full of apologies from visitors from around the world, who attribute ill health, bereavement and other forms of bad luck to their ill-judged decision to go up Uluru.
You don’t have to be superstitious to be chilled by its contents.
In the early days of tourism here, from the 1950s on, the first tour companies simply camped at the base and led their clients up the mountain each morning. Hotels and motels sprang up haphazardly. Since the mid-1980s, however, tourist facilities have been shifted to a purpose-built resort at Yulara, a 15-minute drive away. Yulara offers a wide range of accommodation, from five-star luxury to a campsite. Indeed, the snazziest option, Longitude 131°, combines safari-chic accommodation in a tent with deluxe pricing: an astonishing €1,500 a night.
The government has spent more than €15 million building platforms for viewing Uluru at sunrise and sunset, and you can even enjoy a three-course dinner in the desert once the sun has gone down. As Australians are wont to say, it’s all good.
Paul Cullen was a guest of Tourism Australia and Qantas. See australia.com for more information on holidays in Australia