Day trip to Uluru
Aug 4, 2013 19:55:58 GMT
Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2013 19:55:58 GMT
I made my second trip to Australia around 1984, after a first ridiculous 48 hour visit a year or two earlier. The first trip occurred when I was intoxicated with the fact that I now worked for an airline and could go anywhere in the world for not much money (at least in terms of plane fare). So I put together a round-the-world trip based entirely on the airlines that give me free or almost free tickets. I flew Paris-Seoul free and Seoul-Tokyo free (thank you Korean Airlines) and spent two totally weird nights in each place. Then I flew Tokyo-Sydney and Sydney-Los Angeles, also spending just 48 hours in each place (thank you Qantas for those tickets that cost 7% of normal fare). And finally I flew Los Angeles-Paris to get home on UTA and paid a full 10% of the fare. A few years later, I made an even cheaper trip around the world on other airlines, but we are not here to talk about airline employee perversions -- this really is about Uluru.
The fact is, in just 48 hours in Australia, I completely fell in love with the country and promised myself that I would return as soon as possible. So, a couple of years later, I was back for 3 weeks. I took lots of photos but have not yet unearthed them, except for these. I promise that there will be other reports whenever they become available.
I do recall that I flew from Sydney to Melbourne and then from Melbourne to Adelaide (loved Sydney, did not like Melbourne, liked Adelaide), the whole point of Adelaide being that it was the city with the most flights to Alice Springs. Remember that I was flying standby on all of these flights, so a place that had lots of flights was very important to me.
So now, here we are, I guess in 1984, when Alice Springs was just a cow town (a camel town?) in the middle of nowhere. I vividly remember the flies and also that hats that were on sale everywhere with the dangling corks.
Hard to look more ridiculous, but when you saw the number of flies swarming around you in the outback, they almost made sense. The corks shoo the flies away from your face.
Anywhere, here I was in mythical Alice Springs (if you have never read the book, I heartily recommend the Nevil Shute novel A Town Like Alice which makes it sound so completely charming although the book itself is mostly about horrific Japanese POW camps), the closest town to Uluru. Frankly, the town was nothing to write home about although I'm sure that it has evolved considerably since I was there. It was also the first Australian town that I visited where the majority of the residents were aboriginals, and I have to confess that the 'visible' ones were in a sorry state. They were lying all over the grassy areas with beer cans in their hands as though they had been stratigically placed for a report about the evils of alcohol. Frankly, this is one of the most shocking sights that I have ever seen.
Once again, this has nothing to do with Uluru.
Anyway, I got to Alice Springs and checked into a motel and then found out exactly how hard it was to get to my real destination, which was another 450 kilometers away. As insane as the concept was, there were quite a few places offering day trips to Uluru. These lasted about 16 hours, including about 9 hours on the bus. A "suggested" trip to Uluru is about 3 days, but I happened to be there the year that everything changed. The former "Ayers Rock" area had just been returned to the aboriginal population and one of the things that had happened was that all of the motels and campgrounds that had sprung up around it had just been torn down. The new Yulara tourist area 15 kilometers from Uluru had just opened but consisted at that time of just one luxury hotel and one campsite. People would have to wait another year or two for more diverse options to appear. (Since I have not returned, I still don't know what is there.)
I'm one of those people who believe that just a tiny taste of something is better than no taste at all, so I signed up for one of the day trips, with pickup at the hotel around 5 a.m. Yay!
The fact is, in just 48 hours in Australia, I completely fell in love with the country and promised myself that I would return as soon as possible. So, a couple of years later, I was back for 3 weeks. I took lots of photos but have not yet unearthed them, except for these. I promise that there will be other reports whenever they become available.
I do recall that I flew from Sydney to Melbourne and then from Melbourne to Adelaide (loved Sydney, did not like Melbourne, liked Adelaide), the whole point of Adelaide being that it was the city with the most flights to Alice Springs. Remember that I was flying standby on all of these flights, so a place that had lots of flights was very important to me.
So now, here we are, I guess in 1984, when Alice Springs was just a cow town (a camel town?) in the middle of nowhere. I vividly remember the flies and also that hats that were on sale everywhere with the dangling corks.
Hard to look more ridiculous, but when you saw the number of flies swarming around you in the outback, they almost made sense. The corks shoo the flies away from your face.
Anywhere, here I was in mythical Alice Springs (if you have never read the book, I heartily recommend the Nevil Shute novel A Town Like Alice which makes it sound so completely charming although the book itself is mostly about horrific Japanese POW camps), the closest town to Uluru. Frankly, the town was nothing to write home about although I'm sure that it has evolved considerably since I was there. It was also the first Australian town that I visited where the majority of the residents were aboriginals, and I have to confess that the 'visible' ones were in a sorry state. They were lying all over the grassy areas with beer cans in their hands as though they had been stratigically placed for a report about the evils of alcohol. Frankly, this is one of the most shocking sights that I have ever seen.
Once again, this has nothing to do with Uluru.
Anyway, I got to Alice Springs and checked into a motel and then found out exactly how hard it was to get to my real destination, which was another 450 kilometers away. As insane as the concept was, there were quite a few places offering day trips to Uluru. These lasted about 16 hours, including about 9 hours on the bus. A "suggested" trip to Uluru is about 3 days, but I happened to be there the year that everything changed. The former "Ayers Rock" area had just been returned to the aboriginal population and one of the things that had happened was that all of the motels and campgrounds that had sprung up around it had just been torn down. The new Yulara tourist area 15 kilometers from Uluru had just opened but consisted at that time of just one luxury hotel and one campsite. People would have to wait another year or two for more diverse options to appear. (Since I have not returned, I still don't know what is there.)
I'm one of those people who believe that just a tiny taste of something is better than no taste at all, so I signed up for one of the day trips, with pickup at the hotel around 5 a.m. Yay!