The finish line!
August 16 in Australia ⋅ ☁️ 10 °C
Have to say Camp 3 has been the most luxurious so far. Very comfortable.
We are about 8kms from Uluru so we were rolling at a civilised hour of about 8.15am. So far we have been walking more or less as a single group, today we started off like that but then our guides stopped us after a while and made a roughly 30 second gap between each of us. The idea being we could walk in silence and listen to the sounds around us, kind of like the Japanese idea of Forest Bathing. It was really nice, I took the opportunity to take a heap of photos and a couple of videos.
It wasn’t long (about 4 hours) before we reached Uluru. We walked around to the Mutijulu Waterhole where we had lunch and met the local indigenous landowner TJ again who also spoke to us on our first day. He spoke some more about their connection to country and how they manage the park.
The locals are the Anangu people and it is really interesting learning about how they make use of just about everything they find in the bush. It took a lot of work to set up the walk we have done, it only started in April of this year. The main objective was to let people use the park but in such a way as to minimise the impact as much as possible. So all the structures at the campsites are raised above the ground and all materials (including the buildings) were brought in by helicopter. It has been done really well.
After our chat with TJ we went for a walk around the base of Uluru which was about 8kms. Our guide MC explained the significance of some of the features and showed us some of the important sites, all really interesting. Some sections are considered culturally significant and so we couldn’t take photos - frustrating but the Anangu people believe these sites should be experienced in situ and not diminished by being shared outside of the context of being a part of something bigger, in this case Uluru.
Like I said before from a geological perspective Uluru is different to Kata Tjuṯa in that it is tilted to a 90 degree angle whereas Kata Tjuṯa is about 20 degrees, and the grains in the rock are a lot smaller than at Kata Tjuṯa. This means the northern side of Uluru is about 50 million years older than the southern side as the northern area was laid down first and lifted up.
We were then picked up by a bus and taken back to Camp 3, don’t dwell on the fact it took us 4 hours to walk what the bus covered in about 20 mins!
We then had our final dinner for the tour. Tomorrow we get taken back to Sails in the Desert to recover!
Step count for today: 33,355 a new daily record.Read more