From Darwin, after a two-hours flight, we reached the Red Center and, as we landed, we understood why people call it so. The landscape is desert, there is nothing but rocks and red dirt. In the middle of nothing stands Alice Springs, one of the most famous Australian Outback towns; from here several tours allow you to explore the surrounding areas, including the famous Uluru (Ayers Rock).
There is something to suit every desire, and we chose the Rock tour (therocktour.com.au/), meant for the very adventurous travelers. It is a tour where you can camp, actively participate in collecting firewood, cooking and all that you need to do. Also you have to sleep in open-air sleeping bags, arranged in a circle around the fire, surrounded by nothing but the desert and under a wonderful sky filled with stars. I know that it sounds very romantic, but when it’s zero degrees out there, romanticism disappears and only the raw reality of the freezing cold remains. But we survived, and we are here to tell it to you.
The stops we made during the tour were Kings Canyon, Uluru and Kata Tjuta.
Located about halfway between Alice Spring and Uluru, Kings Canyon is an ancient formation of steep red rock walls, which stand out above a dense palm forest. The steep walls of Kings Canyon have formed in millions of years of erosion of small cracks in the rock. The 6-kilometer long Kings Canyon Rim Walk takes about 3-4 hours. The route offers spectacular views of the gorges below and of the surrounding landscapes. Going down the canyon you will find the Garden of Eden, a permanent natural pool surrounded by green vegetation. Later on, you might be able to admire the unusual rock formations eroded at the time of the Lost City.
Finally we saw Uluru: the most photographed monolith in the world and one of the most popular symbols of Australia. More precisely, it is a part of a much larger and mainly underground monolithic rock formation that also includes the Kata Tjuta and Mount Connor. A remarkable feature of the massif is the way in which it seems to change its color during different times of the day, from sunrise and to sunset. These color effects are due to the minerals of the rock.
Uluru has a special role in the mythology of dreamtime (or tjukurpa) of the local populations. Since it is considered as a sacred place for local aborigines, tourists are repeatedly forbidden to climb the mountain. Actually, in addition to the sacred reasons, there are also others such as those relating to safety issues and the environment. Despite the presence of a sort of handrail that starts only after an exhausting portion of climbing, the massif surface is extremely smooth and, as you go up, both the wind and the possibility of having a heatstroke increase. After about an hour of climbing, there are no toilets at the top, so all residuals left by tourists tend to slip down during the rainy season, thus ruining the ecosystem below. But many of the tourists who visit the site don’t care about it, and in the utmost indifference they go up with no respect for the value and the sacredness that the locals reserve for this rock.
At 25 kilometers far from Uluru, we visited the Kata Tjuta mountains (literally “many heads”), which are part of the same rock formation and have a similar red color.
