A loud announcement woke me in my seat after a surprisingly good sleep. It was followed by Belinda Carlisle's Heaven is a Place on Earth. Wow, what a great and inspired way to wake up and start the day! Immediately I felt happy and eager to go. I decided that when I inevitably get back to the nine to god knows when grind, I will invest in a alarm device with the ability to play Belinda Carlisle to make my day infinitely better.
An hour or so later, I pulled into Alice, and after waiting an age for our bags (in the rain,goddamnit) we piled into the Annie's Place transfer bus. That particular hostel was recommended to me by a girl who had travelled in Australia that I knew through one of my friends back home. It was a good call as well; we dropped our stuff in a colourful, clean room and chipped out to meet Alice.
Alice Springs was surprisingly spacious in volume, albeit with a definite smalltown feel. To give you an idea, it had roughly the same population as my friend hometown of Mersing about 25,000 populations. I can’t think of a small town but correct me if I’m wrong with the number. I pretty suck when comes to number.The only reason it appears on maps is that it's the only thing of any size in the whole of central Australia worth labelling!
The slightly crap mall did, however, finally give me the chance to buy an Aussie hat (and no, it didn't have corks dangling from it - but they did sell such hats, and an American woman actually bought one whilst I was in the shop... tourists, eh?). Ever since my first day in Noosa, I had been eyeing up the suede hats, but I could never find the style I liked in a size that would fit my egg-shaped bone. But that evening, I walked home proudly sporting a genuine Aussie-made bush hat.
My driving hadn't scared Dave (another backpacker from England I met in Sydney) away, and he was happy to travel with me again along with a Japanese traveller friend of his called Misato
He'd arranged to meet up with on The Ghan. The three of us were planning to head out into Australia's red centre to visit a big rock in the middle of nowhere. Those with dodgier knees reading this may know it as Ayer's Rock. Nowadays (and rightly so), it is referred to by its Aboriginal name it held for tens of thousands of years: Uluru.
Dave had spotted a great deal outside his hostel. To hire a car with all camping and cooking equipment included was only AU$110 a day: pennies between three. Snapping it up, within half an hour a car arrived, stocked to the nines with gear, delivered by the company owner, the larger-than-life Rosco. After a spot of shopping for more varieties of mustard, we were soon speeding away from civilisation and into the dry desert of central Australia. I continued to be blown away by the fact you can drive for an hour and encounter nothing. I put it down to coming from Malaysia, where we live on top of each other in comparison.
Uluru was nearly five hours away.
We got all excited when we saw a solitary rock formation spring up out of nowhere on the left. At first we thought it might be Uluru, but on closer examination of the map, it turned out to be the flat-topped mesa of Mount Connor. Impressive all the same, it looked as if it had been plucked right out of Arizona.
When Uluru did finally snake into view, it was an exhilarating sight. Slunk low and wide on the horizon, it darted elusively in and out of view as the road meandered left and right.
As the sun was getting low, we set out straight for the rock, pulling into the sunset viewing area and straight into a parking space. The rock was initially a bright orange (a shade I can only accurately describe as "Dale Winton"), but as the earth turned and left the sun behind, it changed to a deep, fiery red before fading to grey.
We lingered for a while in case it changed colour again - I was holding out for green with pink spots - but with the light fading, we raced to our campsite in the nearby resort of Yulara.
Unloading the car, we broke out our beds for the night: nothing less than four swags (as in. We set up the table and chairs, cracked open the wine and cooked dinner - rice and meat - no crisp sandwiches tonight, thank you very much! I was so snug, warm and content that night, and slept soundly with not a single multi-legged invader to disturb me. I did wake up once though, and I had to pinch myself to check it wasn't all a dream as I grinned and peered up at a blanket of stars somewhere near the red centre of Australia.
One might ask why a human would drive five hours into the Big Nothing to visit a Remarkable Pebble. The answer is because Uluru is breathtaking. A better question one might ask to study human nature is why, once here, tourists climb the rock, despite it being a sacred site to Aborigines and there being copious signs in all manner of languages stating how disrespectful it is to their culture for people to climb.
