Reddish Rocks of Central Australia

The openness of Australians has shown itself precisely in this city. I cannot say the same for Sydney and Melbourne, as most people in Southeast Asia live there. Here you come to a local bar, order a drink, take a look around and around you immediately sit two locals who are already telling stories about the city, about Australia in general, about what kind of job they do and a million other things. Australians move a lot on the hunt for a job, so it’s no wonder here if they did their job in a town near Sydney half a year ago, and if they later found a better paid seasonal job, they moved to Alice Springs for a short time. And not only their openness, but also their kindness and smiling faces is hard not to remember.

The town is not big, and all around it rises red rock, which can be seen nicely from the hill called Anzac. The hill is only 608 meters high and is the only one that gives a view of the town, where there are no skyscrapers, only low buildings.

In the following days I went to the center of the Red Continent to visit a giant red sandstone monolith. Uluru as the Aboriginal people call it, or Ayers Rock is the landmark of the country. This huge red rock is more than three hundred meters high and nine kilometers wide. Together with the Olgas Mountains, or Aboriginal Kata Tjuta (which means many heads), it is part of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.

In fact, the red Australian desert and the huge red stone are home to Aboriginal people, it is their holy place. Every traveler wants to climb Uluru and see Australian desert from the top of the cliff, and more and more local guides who lead groups of tourists to the two mentioned sights warn everyone, that it is a sacred mountain to visit and climbing is prohibited. There are also warning signs along this red rock, marking sacred places. For Aboriginal people, this is a holy land, they even believe that life originated here a long time ago. The desert is their home, the nearby trees, as well as the land, are places where they can find food. Of course, I did not climb the mountain, I respected their wishes.

Uluru is the main attraction for the crowds of photographers who gather around it at sunset and early in the morning at sunrise and wait for the most beautiful moment for the photographer when the sun shines on the mighty rock. The monolith reaches into the ground up to 6,000 meters deep so that only a part of the mighty Ayers Rock is on the surface. As it is one of the natural wonders, the rock is included in the UNESCO World Natural and Cultural Heritage List. Just like Uluru, the Olgas mountains are also sacred. I call them Big Boobs. We spent two days at Uluru, and then we went on a hike around Olgas plus the King's Canyon, but about that canyon a little later. The number of Olgas is over 30; they are round in color and enormously big. They cover an area of 22 square kilometers. The highest of them, called Mount Olga is 1,066 meters high. All around them are trees called desert oaks.

Another thing worth seeing as I mentioned earlier is the canyon called Kings Canyon and it is part of Watarrka National Park. These rocks are also red in color, only the shapes of the rocks in Uluru-Kata Tjuta Park were round, and here they are mostly flat. The canyon is 270 meters high and a four-hour walk along its top offers amazing views of the Australian wilderness.

There are a lot of Aboriginal people in the city of Alice Springs. And what do Aboriginal people do? Aboriginals live in perfect harmony with nature and all living beings, convinced that the earth cannot be anyone's property. The nature that gives them water and food is, in their view, a legacy left by their ancestors to all. This heritage is part of what we know today as “dream time”. There is a widespread belief among most tribes that in parallel with the concepts here and now, there is still a dream time in which people slip when they sleep. In the ancient past, the locals believe, it was just a dream time, and at some point, there was a split and there was a difference between time in waking and sleeping. The beliefs of the locals concerning Uluru-Kata Tjuta Park also help to understand the concept of dream time. Locals say that at the beginning of the world, the rainbow snake woke up from a long sleep deep underground. As she straightened up, a large rock stood in her way. The rainbow snake lifted it to the surface and so Uluru was born.

The Aboriginals in the vicinity of both mentioned rocks are called Anangu. They are almost pure black, with wide noses, full lips and dark eyes that just invite you to ask them a few things about their lives. Unfortunately, they are too shy so that “traveling through the eyes of Aboriginal people” was unfortunately not possible for me. Maybe not even shy, the term is not the most appropriate, they just do not want to hang out with the white people.

Because there is little water here, they get it in different ways (even from desert frogs buried in the sand). But they also know the signs where groundwater is close to the surface. They feed themselves in nature, and the local delicacy is represented by a white worm – a butterfly larva found in wood. They roast it on the fire and eat it. This gives them the much-needed proteins. Aboriginals use a special light spear and a boomerang to hunt animals. It is interesting to listen to the sounds while playing their instrument called didgeridoo. It is an instrument made of a special type of wood, and it is round, and hollow inside, and it emits very interesting sounds. The Aboriginal flag is special, it consists of three colors. The black color represents the Aboriginals, the red the earth on which they live, and the yellow circle in the middle represents the sun. What their flag represents is all they need for their lives and they can find it in the interior of red Australia.

Australia is a relaxed and incredibly positive country (even though Aboriginal people do not let us close). I cannot wait to get back to this wilderness, this time planning to visit the desert south of the town of Alice Springs, all the way to the city of Adelaide.