Roos and Rocks

It's been ages since I've uploaded pictures. Fortunately, I'm at my friend Siall's house, and she has a PC, and she's at her office today, granting me precious access to her desktop and all the wonders it has inside. Siall was one of my housemates my last year of university, and she is also the woman who midwifed my cat Wishbone, who is now 13-years-old (the cat).

At any rate, we're going back to November 6th here. On my last day in Melbourne, I walked around the city's botanical gardens with my cousin Ruthie and her husband Gary. There we coincidentally ran into my cousin Steve and his wife Lisa and also Casey, the girlfriend of my cousin Jeremy, and their dogs. When we ate breakfast at the Canteen, we ran into them again, including Jeremy, no small feat in a city of over 3 million people. When Ruth and Gary dropped me off, I wandered around Federation Square during the Melbourne Cup. The Melbourne Cup is a huge event in Oz. Even the Prime Minister John Howard and his competitor Kevin Rudd (Australia will elect one of them on November 24) bet on the horses. Beyond the obvious fanfare of attending a gambling event, the women dress up in fancy prom-like outfits and don gigantic hats. It's a big deal. At Federation Square the races were projected onto a wall and here again on a big screen TV in the courtyard. Everyone and their mother bet on a horse. The horse who won was named Efficient, and he wasn't a favorite to win. I didn't bet on a horse, although Efficient is the type of name I might've bet on. While the racing horses are treated incredibly well and eat better than we do, there are many horses which are bred for racing and which don't become racing horses and which are treated horribly.


At the Federation Square I went inside the ACMI, which is something like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and watched a few documentaries and animated shorts. One documentary was of Melburnian Yiddish women over 60 who do yoga; it's entitled Stand on Your Head. Also good for a laugh was Babs and Bob's Trip to New Zealand, a 6-minute documentary. Babs brought her video camera with her to New Zealand, and when she saw the red light was on, she thought the camera was off and vice versa. She gave the tapes to her Melburnian daughter to edit, and, appalled, she found the entirety of the footage was video of the ground. When Babs thought her camera was off, she carried it lens-down -- hours of footage of stones, gravel, shoes, toilets.

Following that and an art exhibition of indigenous painters, I walked along South Bank and up to the tallest building in Melbourne, 3800 meters high. Up there it's easy to familiarize oneself with the layout of the town.


Fast-forwarding ahead, I then left for Alice Springs, the town nearest to Uluru, the large sandstone rock in almost the dead center of Australia and considered to be the cultural heart of the country. Before leaving for Uluru and other geological formations, I spent the day in Alice. My favorite place was the baby kangaroo rescue facility, where we were taught to save baby kangaroos, called "joeys," from their mothers' pouches were we to find them killed in the road. They also let us hold the joeys. Here is my German friend Andre with a joey. And, here I am too with a joey named Amy. Amy licked my hand and tried to kiss me.


In the evening I walked up to Anzac Hill and watched the sun set over Alice.

The next morning I rose early and went to Kata Tjuta, arguably more sacred than Uluru. The Aborigines keep many of the mythical stories related to Kata Tjuta secret because of this sacredness. Uluru, in contrast, is more accessible.

The campsite was rather kingly. Each tent contained a bed, mattress, and sleeping bag, a stark contrast to my Colorado camping trip, in which Kimberly and I bore our camping gear on our backs and slept in a megamid during an electrical storm.


While Uluru is one solid monolith, Kata Tjuta has five or six humps. Here is one of them.


The next morning I circumambulated Uluru, just beyond sunrise. Uluru is a peaceful rock. I didn't climb it, out of respect for the Aborigines and their requests.


Here is a waterhole on the side of Uluru.


Along certain faces of the rock are cave paintings. These paintings are important to the Aborigines, in that they represent sacred stories and are ways of teaching their descendants how to survive. Not only might the Aborigines, here called the Anangu, pass on creation stories, but they also might draw maps of how to survive in the vicinity. Included on the map are plants and animals. In this drawing, the concentric circles represent waterholes or towns. The U or C shape represents a person. The line next to the C represents a digging stick.


That evening I went on my first camel ride. The camels are adorable and friendly. They'd bow their heads low so that I might pet their noses. They also enjoyed being scritched behind the ears. As I rode on one camel, I'd pet the ears of a caravaning, neighboring camel.



The following morning I hiked through Kings Canyon and walked past several features called "The Lost City" and "The Garden of Eden."


The base of this canyon is entitled the Garden of Eden, because it resembles a tropical jungle. Gigantic cycads, ferns, and eucalypts thrive in the water at the bottom.


The sandstone, mudstone, and silica formed these stratified layers.


Before leaving the center of the country, I said goodbye to my new friends and walking companions. Here are Julia and Philip from Stuttgart, Germany, and Hitesh "H" from Birmingham, England.