Day 16 - Yulara

Monday, 14 June 2021

Water. Wet, warm, clean, plentiful. Pouring over my body with great abundance, sweeping away all the grit and grime of a fortnight’s camping. Such luxury.

Next, we haul three pillowcases full of dirty clothes to the laundry. Two machines are missing, one is broken, two are being used. That leaves two for us. While I hover protectively over our machines, Johan goes back to camp to make coffee. I buy a couple of hyper expensive croissants from the coffee van parked in front of reception. We enjoy breakfast at the round table inside the laundry room, machines buzzing and bumping.

We hang the clothes on the hoists back of the laundry, scattered in between other campers' clothes. I peg my clothes in a peculiar way, one peg joining two pieces of clothing. My mother did it that way back in the ‘60s (the rest of my childhood involved dryers) but I’ve never seen it done that way by Australians, who, by and large, still peg their clothes on the line. It makes it easy to identify which clothes are ours when we return later in the afternoon to collect them.

A second breakfast of muesli, yoghurt and fruit. A nearly two-hour zoom with my mum. Another two hours of catching up on work. Emails, Google searches, weather reports. Late afternoon: I’ve had enough of computers!

We venture out of the campground and into the maze of restaurants, hotels and shops that make up Yulara, in search of the Gecko Café. Our expectations for an expensive meal out aren’t high, but the chicken pizza and haloumi & roasted veg salad are good enough.

In this white man’s world, the black people who live on the fringes freely walk around, in and out of the shops and cafés, a group of kids playing spin-the-bottle on a sitting platform, squealing high when the bottle neck points towards them. The adults carry their hulking frames with slow drudgery, dressed in brightly patterned clothes, barefoot, unmanaged hair, wild faces. Some sit on the pavement with their artwork splayed out around them. It’s attractive but unoriginal, cheaper than you find in the galleries.

We climb in bed, read, serenaded by the buzzing grind of a neighbour’s generator, later by the trilling trawl of the machines at the waste treatment centre, situated next door to the Overflow Area.

It’s fine. Getting clean is good. Seeing how our fellow humans holiday is interesting, a good reality check to the whimsical way we do it. We look forward to leaving the tourist mecca behind and heading back to the bush tomorrow.

Sunrise upon Uluru, as seen from the Ayers Rock Campground viewing platform, the morning of our departure.