Saturday, 12 June 2021
Travel two weeks in any far-flung place and one starts to imbibe the culture of the place. On our last visit to Thailand, upon our return home I bought steaming baskets, an outsized mortar and pestle, raw coconuts for milking, determined to keep up the nascent skills I had earned participating in a Thai cooking class in Chiang Mai. It lasted about a week.
Two weeks on the dusty deserted outback desert roads with little human contact has left us gritty and raw. The car, inside and out, is covered in red dust. Our clothes stink. I won’t go into body aromas. The need to wash, organise, keep things neat and tidy diminishes. And yet – we don’t mind. There’s something strangely appealing about it all. As though this is the way human animals have lived for their entire history, minus the last couple of centuries – or less. OK, let’s be clear. We’re driving a diesel-drinking 4WD. We sleep in a comfy off-the-ground bed piled high with super warm doonas. Our fridge is (still) full of appetizing provisions, including Camembert cheese, home-made yoghurt, chocolate bars, mixed nuts, beer and chardonnay. It’s not like we’ve gone back to caveman times.
Still. Arriving at Kata Tjuta this morning had the effect of making us feel we were veering more toward prehistoric times than our neatly dressed neighbours in the carpark, white cars clean as first snow and smelling of the panoply of perfumery that make up our personal body care pharmacology in modern times.
The time to visit the red hot centre of Australia is in the dead of winter, not, as we did 10 years ago, in the peak of summer when temps hovered just short of 40C and the carpark was empty. Today, the carpark was full. We were lucky to get one of the last two bays assigned for “Coaches”, but which were mostly used by cars with caravans, or us with our camper trailer.
Ten years ago, Johan didn’t have the strength or stamina to hike the rigorous 7.4km Grade 4 trail that winds through the billowing bobbins of compressed rock that make up Kata Tjuta. So it was fun to do it together, despite the heavy traffic. Doing the trail solo – I truly met no one in the 3 hours I walked the trail in 2010 – put me in tune with the spirit of the place. It felt profound and not easy to convey my experience when it was finished.
Today, it felt pleasant and a good opportunity for exercise after two weeks in a car. We took pictures, enjoyed the abundance of wildflowers, talked to some fellow retirees doing the ring-around-Australia in their newly acquired mobile home, enjoyed the general camaraderie with the folk on the trail. It just wasn’t church. Wasn’t sacred.
Just past the signs that mark the entrance to the park back up the Central Rd., we find a track veering off into the bush. We drive in half a kilometre and find the perfect spot for camping and evening viewing of the reddening behemoth that is Kata Tjuta.
Tomorrow: Uluru.
i'm continuing to enjoy your photos and descriptions!
ReplyDeletewhat kind of camera are you using?
Nikon Coolpix P950, but also our Oppo phone cameras!
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