Rock around The Rock

A decent catch-up sleep for a change with a more civilised 7.30am start to the day. We decided this would be a less exhausting day, so first stop was the Cultural Centre located at the base of Uluru.

The place is set up beautifully, and even if one doesn’t subscribe to the Aboriginal beliefs it’s still a great place to visit. We learnt much about the history of the area and saw great examples of their arts and crafts. We then spent an interesting half-hour or so chatting to the (non-Aboriginal) manager of the adjacent art gallery. Originally from Adelaide she has spent a number of years living and working among the Aboriginal people of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands north of Adelaide and is now immersed in Aboriginal culture at Uluru where she helps them with their painting. The gallery has plenty of original art for sale, though at prices from $400 up to around $12,000. Unsurprisingly we chose not to purchase anything.

From the Cultural Centre we took a five-minute drive to our next stop, from where we walked a few hundred metres to the Mutitjulu waterhole, a permanent source of water in the shadow of the rock. The area for some distance around is very green with plenty of vegetation. A big surprise for us both has been the amount of vegetation throughout the entire area wherever we’ve gone. The unusually-shaped desert oaks are the main tree species but there are plenty of acacias as well as other low shrubs. Spinifex and other species cover the bare earth. It’s quite unlike the bare desert conditions we’d been expecting to see.

Following our waterhole walk Carol decided to wait at the carpark while Brian set off for a walk on the track which goes right round Uluru. The full circuit is 10km, which is way beyond either of our capabilities. While there are plenty of keen and energetic walkers who were doing the full circumnavigation, most of them well below our vintage, There were also many riders of hire bikes and Segways on the circuit. Brian walked for an estimated 1.5km before acknowledging his limitations and turning back. That was always going to be the plan. No point in overdoing it, even though it was tempting to have kept going as the features of Uluru are different at every turn. As a consolation prize we drove round the rock, and that was scenic and interesting in itself.

We then headed back to our accommodation for a brief rest then visited the Gallery of Central Australia, adjacent to our resort. It was quite interesting, though we were more taken by the less overtly commercial gallery we’d visited earlier in the day.Read more