The Big Red Rock
Ayers Rock (Uluru) and Melbourne
Our entire reason for visiting Australia is to see Ayers Rock, or Uluru. Yuki’s Dad wanted to see it and climb it after reading about it in a book. It is a massive sandstone monolith that sticks up from the flat outback in the middle of nowhere. After the Sydney Opera House, it might be the next most identifiable icon of Australia.
There are only 5 flights into Ayers Rock a day, and two are from Sydney. I figured that visiting Ayers Rock is the equivalent of going from Toronto to Churchill, Manitoba to see the Northern Lights — it’s a tourist attraction that requires an expensive flight for only a few days’ trip to see a single thing with nothing else to do.
Since there were four of us, it made more sense to rent a car for the 3 full days that we were there. This would allow us to come and go as we please, and we wouldn’t need to rely on expensive bus tours, of which there are several.
There are five hotels for Ayers Rock, all in the same community and all managed by the same company. The 4-bed dormitory room we booked was the only room available when I looked into booking accommodations back in Vancouver. As a prison-like masonry building with four bunk beds, it felt a little like being back in a student’s residence with a separate washroom building and kitchen area. Although there were several restaurant options, we chose to get our own food from the supermarket and cook our own meals, which was substantially cheaper.
Since we had 3 full days, we took it easy on our arrival day and just went to the hotel’s viewpoint. Although it was just a small sand dune “hill” in the outback, it gave us a fairly nice view of the rock. Without knowing any better, I would have been happy with this view at sunset and could have gone home. But that wasn’t the case, as the next day we were able to get up close.
Uluru is situated in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which costs $25/person to enter for up to 3 days. This was conveniently the amount of days that we had planned to explore the area. The drive into the park isn’t far, and there is a road that goes around the rock with three main stopping points, the first being the Mala Walk.
The beginning of the Mala walk is also where there’s a trail to hike up the 348m to the top of Uluru. The rock is sacred to the aboriginals so they don’t want tourists to go up, but a lot still do. Mr. Kishimoto wanted to go up, but it may have been fortunate that we arrived just after they closed the gate to the trail because of the wind. We avoided a difficult discussion with Mr. Kishimoto on the dangers of a steep ascent in his moleskin slippers on bare rock with just posts and chains but no guardrails.
Instead, we did the Mala Walk along part of the perimeter of Uluru. There are several informative signposts along the way and some interesting history about the caves where the aboriginals lived. The caves are mostly small indentations in the rock where there is shelter from the sun and rain. At the end of the 30 minute walk, there is a small waterhole called the Kantju Gorge.
Along the drive around Uluru, you can stop practically anywhere for a photo.
The second stop on the other side of Uluru is the Mutijulu Waterhole. This waterhole is slightly larger, and I imagine that when it pours, the rainwater flowing down Uluru would look pretty spectacular.
There are also some more caves and fallen rocks around this area that make for some interesting photos. Most of the caves have pictographs drawn on them by the aboriginals.
The third and last stop was the cultural centre. I admit that I didn’t understand the logic of the aboriginal legends, but it was cool to see the history of the area and how the aboriginals had worked with the white people to turn the place into a park. I did notice that almost all the signs and stories were told in the first person using “we”, which is much more personal than those in Canada, where a third-person narrative is used and intended to be factual rather than personal.
One of the more attractive things to do at Ayers Rock is to watch the sunset over it. There is a specific car park for this and we joined the row of campers setup to watch this event. I found it okay, but not spectacular. This is probably because the viewpoint is slightly far away from Uluru, and there are some shrubs in the foreground that block out some of the rock’s bottom. Still, I was glad to have seen it and it was good that we went that night because the next two days were cloudy.
The next day we drove out to Kata Tjuta, another large rock formation that is visible from the hotel but about an hour’s drive away from Uluru. The sunset viewing parking lot wasn’t great again for the same reason of having bushes in the way.
Kata Tjuta doesn’t have a road around it, but it does have a hike in and around the big bumps. Whereas Uluru is one large rock formation, Kata Tjuta is a series of rocks. We did the Valley of the Winds walk to the first Kata Lookout.
The sheer size of the sandstone rock is hard to express on camera and is surprisingly massive. Even though there are bigger things in the world, something about large rock formations on a flat landscape make these rocks feel gigantic.
The Valley of the Winds trail leads to another circular loop trail, but it looked too rocky and rough for Yuki’s parents so we went back to the sunset viewing area for a short rest before taking on another walk, the Walpa Gorge.
Yuki and I particularly enjoyed this walk into a valley between two near-vertical rock formations. The trail made us feel minuscule between these enormous rocks and gave us wonderful photo opportunities throughout its entire length. If you have Google Cardboard, you can see the photosphere I took in all its glory:
[photo sphere]
It’s easy to see the park in two days because there are only two rock formations, so on the third day when it was raining we slept in. We’d pretty much covered the park and everything else is really far away, so we just hung around the hotel for the morning. In the afternoon, we felt obligated to go out so we stopped at a cafe for a drink and then went to Uluru once again to see the sunrise/sunset viewing spot, which we hadn’t been to on the first day.
It was alright, but it didn’t have the best views because of its distance from the rock. With the wind and cloud, this day was much cooler than the previous couple days.
I thought that the Mutijulu Waterhole might have a nice waterfall from all the rain from the previous night, so we visited this trail again. We may have been too late to see it by the time we got there, and the water may have already washed down. With nowhere new to go, we went back to the hotel and packed for our next destination: Melbourne.
Our few days in Melbourne was just enough time to see the city highlights before Yuki’s parents jetted off back to Bangkok. I found downtown Melbourne to be a nice place that had interesting architecture and was quite walkable. The first place we went was the State Library, which has a large octagonal reading room. Around the perimeter are balconies with exhibits, making it something like a free museum.
We did a lot of walking around the downtown area. It’s not too big and easily walkable, though I imagine that if you lived outside of downtown you would forever hate the congestion while trying to get in and out.
There are free trams downtown, but all of the tourist maps for the trams and transit in Melbourne are incomplete and not too useful for navigating. This confusion reminded us of our confusion with Sydney’s transit fare system. It took us a while to figure out how to use the Melbourne tram system, its routes, and stops, and we only figured it out by using Google Maps with data. Still, it got us to the Docklands park, a new development of a former dock land. Most of the towers here look like they were recently built and are empty. Most of the ground floor suites we could see into were empty. The library, however, was interesting and we took a short walk through it. From the outside, it seemed like just a good place to get away from the cold wind, but the inside was something else. The interior was of marvellous glulaminated and CLT construction. There was a lot of daylight, and the lights also brightened or dimmed as the sun emerged from or passed behind clouds outside. Apparently it’s Australia’s first public CLT building and the most sustainable in the country.
From Docklands we could see two bridges. Once was the Bolte Bridge, the most horrendous vehicle bridge I’ve ever seen, and the second is the Webb Bridge, a pedestrian bridge. The Bolte Bridge is terrible because it was designed by an architect to look like a cable-stayed bridge without the cables, so it has useless towers and a balanced-cantilevered deck that is probably structurally deeper than it needs to be. The Webb bridge also had architectural involvement, with a steel barrel vault over a deck on concrete box girders. The bridge spirals at one end to attain the elevation needed to cross the river while being wheelchair and bike accessible.
We crossed the Webb Bridge and walked into factory outlets looking for athletic shirts but couldn’t find anything cheap or that would fit me. Afterwards, we crossed back downtown on the Seafarers bridge.
This was an interesting bridge to me, because the cable-stayed bridge reminded me of a personal SketchUp project I did a long time ago. I called it the Diamond-Y bridge and it was a study on using struts to extend the range of the cable-stays. This bridge was structurally similar and also incorporated elements of another SketchUp study I did called the Circular Pedestrian Bridge, which used a ring-shaped tower instead of regular pylons. The similarity between the constructed bridge and my two ideas from 2012 was inspiring to me, showing me that my ideas are possible.
We did a good amount of walking around the malls and arcades in Melbourne because they were slightly warmer than the cool weather outside. I thought the malls were pretty cool because they span several blocks and are connected by bridges over roads. As well, they’re fairly large and most importantly, they don’t have doors but have wide openings so they’re easy to walk in and out of. It helps to connect the indoors with the outdoors in a mild climate. The Arcades are exterior, covered walkways that are almost like buildings and have old architecture.
One novelty that we tried in Melbourne was soft serve ice cream with cotton candy. I can’t say it was the best thing ever but it certainly looks cool.
On our last day in Melbourne we visited Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing store, and finally found $20 athletic shirts in extra-small that fit me so I bought five — which is the most shopping I’ve done in two years since I bought three pairs of pants on clearance from MEC that also fit me well. I was quite happy to have clothes that fit and it was a good time to replace my tattered old shirts. A Uniqlo just opened in Metrotown and I’m curious to see (when we get back to Vancouver) whether they have XS sizes that fit me or not.
