Red

The colour red has been firmly imprinted in my mind over the last few days. It is the colour of the sand in the central Australian desert, it is the mystical glow of Uluru in the early morning sun, and it is the magical aura of the setting sun over Kata Tjuta. Stunning, overwhelming, awe-inspiring. Need I say more?

I guess I better should :) Apart from a tourguide that sometimes treated us a bit to much as 5-year olds, the tour of the centre was a big succes. Kings Canyon was full of surprises. A barren canyon formation with an oasis of green in the heart of it. Not to hard to figure why it's called the Garden of Eden. It looked completely out of place in it's rocky and dry surroundings. It was also the home of The Lost City, a formation of rocks that looks like a long abandoned city turned to stone. Very mysterious... until you hear the geological explanation of the guide of course... damn the demistification of modern science :)

After spending half a night sleeping in swags under the stars, we got woken up by a shower of rain at 2.30 in the morning. I very reluctantly got up and moved to a dryer spot after waiting for ten minutes for the rain to stop and hoping that the swags were waterproof... which they weren't. This resulted in a very wet swag and a damp sleepingbag. The following nights we were allowed to sleep in basic tents because of the persistent rain. After an early start to the second day, we witnessed our first Uluru sunrise (read Evy's Flemish blog for a funny and mildly embarissing anecdote about this). It was a bit of a dissapointment. Because of the clouds the sun didn't manage to glow up Uluru. Just as we got back into our bus though, the sun came out and we all rushed out again to catch a glimpse of this phenomenon. It only lasted for a minute or so, but it was impressive. It was also the best we'd get to see of it, 'cause on the next morning the sun never managed to get from behind the clouds... pitty.

The rain was persistent over the 3 days of the tour. That would've been a big turn-off if it weren't for a walk in the Olga's ( or Kata Tjuta in Aborigine). Because of the rain we saw dozens of little magnificent waterfalls that grace this special rock formation in wet weather. According to our guide we were very lucky with the weather, 'cause "only 1 percent of people who visit the centre get to see this phenomena". Good weather, it seems, is relative :) But boy was our guide right. The 7.something km walk in the pouring rain turned out to be my favourite moment of the tour.

On the last day we got the choice of climbing Uluru, or doing a walk around the base of it. In the light of my recent experiences the first choice would've been the way to go. I decided not to do it in the end though, 'cause (as we learnt during the tour) Uluru is a very significant spiritual place for Aboriginals. The summit of Uluru used to be a place where important rituals took place. thus, in Aboriginal lore the walk to the summit of Uluru is only allowed to be undertaken by Aborigine who have been deemed worthy spiritually. The European colonists claimed Uluru (or Ayers Rock as they called it, after one of the first governers of South Australia) and the surrounding land as their own, rejecting the Aborigine's right to it. It was only in the 80's that Australian government partly returned the land to it's rightfull owners, but only if the Aboriginal community let it open for visitors in the form of a National Park. Because of this the Aboriginals can't refuse access to the Uluru climb (100's of people do it daily). They can only ask visitors of the national park to respect their wish not to do it... which is what I did. The base walk was nice (and in sunny weather, which was a nice change) and it gave us the opportunity to get up close and personal with the worlds largest monolith.

We've been back in Alice Springs for 2 days now and are leaving for Darwin (22 hours in the bus) this evening. We are aware of a new cyclone (Monica, category 1) that is supposed to hit the north of Australia. According to the last predictions it is heading for the northern tip of Queensland, which is well out of our way. So aside from the possibility of a lot of rain we probably won't be affected much of the cyclone. No worries :)

Yesterday we booked a great deal. We booked for a 3 day sailingtrip of the Whitsunday islands, 3 days in a 4WD on Frasier Island (the worlds larges sand island), and 4 nights accomodation on Queensland's worldfamous beaches. We haven't set a date for the trip yet, as we probably will have to do some work again when we get to Queensland at first. But it's all payed for and we just have to reconfirm when we're ready to go. Great!

Oh yeah, one more tip: Check this site out : http://www.australietrip.web-log.nl/ . It's the blog of a Dutch couple we met on our last tour. It's got a lot of beautiful pictures of that tour (even one of us if you look carefully), and of all the other places they visited. A great blog!

Cheers!