AUSTRALIA PART I: Sydney re-cap and Uluru/ Kata Tjuta (Ayers Rock/ The Olga’s)

Muhuhahahaha!!! I finally get the chance to write out all that has happened since those first two days in Sydney…which as you can see is a lot… but it should be an interesting read and it sure has been an awesome holidays!

The Raymond family (family friends in Sydney) was soooo good to Katherine and me! Besides picking us up from the airport, giving us a driving tour of Sydney for our first couple hours in the early morning, setting us up at a backpackers (because they already had someone using their guest room), dropping us off at the opera house… which was beautiful as you can see…


...plus taking us out to dinner, dropping us off and picking us up at the movies, showing us around Sydney university and the art gallery, and dropping us off at the airport on our way to Uluru... From start to finish, they showed us the true meaning of hospitality!

A funny anecdote about walking around Sydney Uni … Chris (Ian’s son) really had no idea where we were going but we walked in a building reminiscent of Harry Potter, saw some art and listened to some eerie bells on the quad. All of this waiting for his mates to show us around, but when they got out of class for lunch we met them at the school pub (yeh… awesome!) and listened to this emo guy with a guitar talking about “where is your god now, the only republican left in town…” the music was skilled but sucked, the beer was good though. Anyway the funny bit was that we went all the way around the world to the university to talk to someone about kit taking a semester abroad and when we got to the office they told us to use the computer where they had just updated the website! Huh… well that was hilarious… but it was good times, the campus was actually pretty cool.

Uluru and Kata Tjuta (two awesome GIANT rock formations... as you can see...)

We caught a plane straight from Sydney to Uluru, getting in in the afternoon. The movie was terrible, but it was a short flight… read my book. After we got into the hostel on a free shuttle bus we went shopping for food, had some meat pies and signed up for a star gazing tour for that night and a shuttle service out to the rocks for the next few days. After we got back I gave mum a call and told her our plans for the next few days until we met up in Melbourne, then rang Saskia to see if me and kit could stay with her, which we could, which was awesome. We had forgotten to buy dinner from the super market for that night so kit and me ended up spending waaaaay too much on food that we had to cook ourselves…

…We finished cooking our food just in time to scarf it down and catch the bus out to the “observatory.” There we were met by our jovial tour guide who proceeded to point out many star constellations (the southern cross, all the star signs and my favorite, a couple called simply “the triangles”). There were a lot of cool facts about the size of the galaxy and how far stars were from us in light years, but the coolest thing was looking through the telescope at all of the binary star systems, the close planets and galaxies! The second coolest thing was something I had heard about but never seen, the dark spot in the Milky Way… sooo cool! Since we were in the southern hemisphere the Milky Way is a lot bigger (looking through the center of the galaxy to the other side) and out in the desert thousands of miles away from any metropolis there was no light pollution. The dark spot spanned almost the entire sky and was in the shape of a very slim emu, cool! We got back early and I ended up having a beer with some Germans (pretty funny conversation) and watching the aboriginals drinking and play pool. I went to sleep at 9…early (trend for our stay at Uluru).

DAY 1
We had an early morning (another trend) the next day, waking up at 5.40(!!!), kit took a shower and we both put soooo many layers on, because it was COLD. You would think in the middle of Australia that it would be stinkin hot, but it is a desert and in the winter it gets really cold! We took the bus out to look at the sunrise over Uluru…



Sooooo beautiful! And yeh, then we got dropped off at the climbing point car park, where we decided to walk to the visitors center, where we learned a lot about aboriginal culture and stuff, pretty cool. We decided to walk back to the car park to take a free guided tour, but we had a ½ an hour to wait so we started to walk around the rock and didn’t want to walk back for the tour so we kept on going. We walked 14 km’s around the rock; about 9 miles before we got the shuttle back to the backpackers. I took soooo many pictures, Katherine and I found a cave


It was a good morning. That afternoon I read my book, took a nap, a shower, and we left again for sunset. I decided that I ought to climb up the rock, even thought the aboriginals don’t really want you to… look at everyone climb it!

…so I only climbed up halfway (not that respectful, nor worth it…) it was sooo scary.


… Once I got going Katherine went up a couple meters before heading back, then I came down and we went on a really cool little walk into this gorgeous gorge (ha-ha!).
i took some cool artsy pics...

Sunset was amazing!


Then we made some gnocchi for dinner and stole a little bit from the salad bar… good dinner. After that we were both pretty tired (yay early mornings!) so we went to sleep at like 8.

DAY 2
We woke up at 5.40am again and I took a shower… so cold! We took a little longer to get ready and breaky going so we were about 5 minutes late, but the bus is always a little late... well this guy told us that he had seen our bus go and we asked him if he was going to Kata Tjuta, he said yes. He gave us a ride…ho took us to Uluru, The wrong giant rock formation. Luckily we were chummy with the shuttle bus driver who was at Uluru and he gave us a lift back to the hostel and rebooked us for the sunrise the next morning at no extra charge (Aussies are just awesome like that!). We went to Kata Tjuta for a shorter walk later that morning and it was awesome… not as gorgeous as the gorge at Uluru, but gigantically gracious to say the least(my sister is on the track in the bottom right for some idea of the size of it... yeh, that little red dot!)

After we got back and had lunch I wrote a whole bunch of post cards, a letter and took a 3-hour nap! Then woke up with enough time to eat some toast for dinner, watch some teli, read some book and go back to sleep. All together too much sleep!

DAY 3
The sunrise on Kata Tjuta was amazing!!!

...and then...

and the view of uluru from far off... look at the horizon, that huge rock is in the middle of NOWHERE!

The valley of the winds

The valley of the winds blew us away… ha-ha… but seriously it was both windy and magnificently beautiful. We went through the mountains and into this valley, it was like stepping into the past… I could imagine dinosaurs roaming, or an aboriginal village, cool stuff. Kit and I sat on a rocky out crop admiring it for a while… we even saw a lone kangaroo!

I think that both Uluru and Kata Tjuta were awesome, but the latter was less crowded and I think grander… both equally beautiful, I can see why the aboriginals see the area as so sacred in the middle of thousands of miles or sand dunes.
When we got back to the hostel there was just enough time for me to whip together some awesome stir-fry with peanut butter, eat it and take a shower. We were off on the shuttle to the airport, in the plane (I had window seat and it was pretty awesome), in Sydney, in another plane, in Melbourne, on a bus downtown, in a cab to Saskias, and at Saskias around 10! Yeh traveling!
The movie on the plane was pretty good, the interpreter, it was about Africa like the book I am reading, the poisonwood bible… which is about a Baptist missionary family in the Congo as it gained independence in the 60’s. The book is pretty intense, anti-Christianity… there is a line repeated a couple of times, “there are Christians and there are Christians.” It is true… and the book is depressing on the whole… it has really made me think though... lots of questions for my next book, the case for faith.
Any ways Saskia was baby-sitting so we went to sleep and saw her in the morning.