The Rock Show

Our Virgin Blue Embraer E-Jet 170 plays a risky game of chicken with a neighbouring aircraft as we start our descent into Sydney, like Saturday shoppers racing for the same park. Clive James said that “nothing should be allowed to detract from a proper celebration of that first, and continuing, impression of Sydney and its harbour,” but the heady mix of both goading and plummeting was distracting. James continues: “It remains one of the Earth's truly beautiful places,” and “the place is too multifarious to be captured by the pen.” But then he was born there. We rubberneck to see vanishing views of “Venice without the architecture, and more of the sea,” of bridges and beaches and schooners and a pointy opera house, but we’re efficiently parked before the scene can truly settle. This is our last glimpse of the blues and greens of Earth before our trek “through the guts” and into a contrary, arid Martian otherness.

Virgin Blue don’t fly direct to Ayer’s Rock Airport from Brisbane, so your flight south to Sydney takes one hour and ten minutes, followed by a journey northwest of three hours and thirty minutes: a combined travel time of four hours forty minutes. Leaving from London Heathrow, you could travel to Cairo in roughly the same time. Looking down over endless tracts of land - seemingly uninhabited, unperturbed and increasingly unremarkable - the sheer scope of the ground below takes on a breathless uniformity. Although we were only stopping halfway across the country, this is a scene that goes on. And on. And on.

That is until The Rock comes into focus like a giant mutant hump on the landscape. The initial reaction is almost comedic: it is both instantly identifiable yet incredibly alien. The only thing to do is gawp at it, which has been the standard response of tourists for well over 50 years, since Northern Territory aviator Edward ‘EJ’ Connellan learnt quicker than most about the financial implications of dropping people into the country’s red centre. When Connellan started chartered flights to Uluru, his business advisors were adamant, asking “Who would ever want to visit that?”

From 1959, Connellan ran Qantas ‘Butterflies’ and Douglas DC3s from an airstrip directly beside the rock. Archive images show aircraft narrowly avoiding the monolith as they come into land. In 1962, tourist numbers reached 5,500. Now, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park gets around 400,000 visitors a year. Wisely, a new airport was opened in 1984 outside the recognised National Park boundaries, some nine miles north of the Uluru site. This is the beige brick, steel pole and corrugated iron structure that you still arrive at today, seemingly modelled on a British leisure centre from the 1980s. It is still called Ayer’s Rock Airport, which is confusing, considering 26 years have passed since the land was handed back to the native Anangu traditional owners. Staring at a departure screen with the technical capabilities of Ceefax, Sydney suddenly feels thousands of miles away - both literally and metaphysically. Elemental things like time and space seem to serve very little purpose here.

In a trait so adorably Australian, the inherent dangers of the outback are everywhere. “Be prepared for dingoes and wild dogs,” says one sign, slightly gloating, I feel, and featuring this fabulously contrary advice: “If threatened by a dingo – STAY CALM!” Step outside, and within seconds a swarm of flies assemble into a makeshift beard to buzz around your face. Tourists, blurry eyed from a long haul flight and starting their outback journeys in the desert, may be averse to assume that they had not only landed on Mars, but also travelled back in time and been turned into defenceless prey for marauding beasts and insects. And that’s before they've even seen the resort.

The Ayer’s Rock Resort, located in the manufactured community of Yulara, is a purpose built holiday park run by the cast of Adventureland – mostly gap year, rosy cheeked sorts with time to burn and money to save. The resort currently employs 800 people. This number jumps to 2000 in peak season: chefs, janitors, Japanese interpreters, masseuses, bus drivers, newsagents, doctors, police, all employed to assist you in your gawping.

I am fascinated as to why anyone would purposely choose to stay here in complete isolation for longer than is truly necessary. The nearest town, Alice Springs, is 266 miles away. Our waiter Andy has been here for a year and possesses the resigned weariness of a man unsure as to whether he should spend his time polishing the cutlery or stabbing the implements into his knees. “I quit today,” he tells us. “I’m over it.” I’m told by one of the tour guides the average length of stay for employees is three months. We’re here for three days, and I would think that should be more than adequate.

Bill Bryson has a theory about this, that the rock possesses such a captivating, arresting, hypnotic quality that once you’ve seen it, it is hard to pull yourself away. “You realise that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it.” We talked to people on their third, fourth or fifth visits. Our tour guide, the indomitable Cheryl, is one week into a year long stint, travelling out there at 5am most mornings to catch the sun rise over the rock. We follow her out there one morning, and I can see why she does it.

Once you’ve paid the $25 entry fee to gain access to the park, it takes a good 20 minutes of driving until you can successfully bask under Uluru’s looming shadow. Now, considering that such a vast amount that has already been said on the subject, I want to make it clear from the outset that attempting to quantify and express those initial emotions is probably rather perfunctory, because even if you haven’t seen it, you can probably imagine just how amazed you will be when you finally do. Like Bryson says, “It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock.”

So here’s what you already know: it’s big. It’s huge, actually. It even looks big from the resort’s designated look out points, and they’re 20km away. To take a photo on ground level with the rock in full frame would almost certainly involve having to stand around 5km away from it. It is 1150 feet high, five and a half miles round. The base walk takes three and a half hours. Yes. It’s big.

It is also the same colour as the ground surrounding it due to the iron in the sandstone, which creates a rusted cover of redness. A very gradual erosive process is marking Uluru with dripping, clay-like contours and indentations on the surface, as if the whole thing is melting in slow motion. The rock has hills, and large crevices, caves, imprints and bizarre cavities. It has a front and a back. Every view from the ground level is unique; it never appears the same way twice. To dismiss it simply as a rock does Uluru a great disservice: it has personality.

This might explain Aboriginal dreamtime stories attributing the rock’s creation to giant snakes and lizards. The spiritual significance that the Anangu place on the rock is still very prominent: it is prohibited to photograph certain parts deemed sacred for ceremonial purposes, and despite signs imploring people not to, hoards of people still attempt to climb it.

Of course, it would be quite simple to stop people from doing this. You would think that the sheer exertion involved would be discouraging enough. Small sections of guide rope and a slight dirt track have been planted into the rock for assistance, but it’s a small gesture. There have so far been 38 deaths from people attempting to climb it – eight from falling off. But Cheryl thinks the figure could be in the hundreds. “People get back to their hotel rooms and don’t come out,” she says.

Quite recently, a family had to be rescued from the top with second degree burns when the searing heat caused their Crocs footwear to melt. Considering the temperate out here can reach 45°C (with the lowest evening temperatures recorded at -4°C), it is little wonder that Uluru is often closed to climbers. The Anangu have a word for people who climb the rock: minga. Ants.

Cheryl offers a more geological explanation as to how a giant rock might end up in the middle of such a vast, expansive and relatively flat nothingness. Uluru is in fact only the tip of a much larger underground sandstone mountain which descends 6km (around 3.7 miles) into the earth. To even comprehend this, you need to imagine a time of around 500 million years ago when huge fragmented clumps of sandstone were being rapidly transported from newly formed mountain ranges via fierce flowing rivers and dumped into oceans which have long since vanished. The ground around Uluru is still diminishing, unearthing more of the slowly eroding rock in the process. “Come back in 20 million years time and Uluru will be about two kilometres tall.” And Andy will probably still be working there.

In contrast, consider Kata Tjuta, which is actually 200 metres taller than Uluru and much bigger with a circumference of 24km (nearly 15 miles). Visually, it is much more staggering than it's iconic neighbour. Made up of 36 ‘domes’, it is located 16 miles from Uluru, and famously referred to as The Olgas. This is down to a somewhat elaborate display of brownnosing from intrepid Bristol born explorer Ernest Giles, who saw the protruding, phallic-like anomalies from a look out point at King’s Canyon and, for some reason, immediately thought of naming the tallest peak Mount Mueller, after the German born explorer Baron von Mueller, who happened to be funding his expedition. Mueller, instead, named it after Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia as a way of returning the complement for being made a baron. It is highly likely that Giles spotted Uluru at the same time, although all credit seems to go William Gosse, who gave it the name Ayer’s Rock in 1873 in recognition of South Australian Premier Sir Henry Ayers.

At Kata Tjuta, Cheryl leads us directly into a giant gorge amongst the domes, where vegetation thrives at even the highest, driest points. Here, we learn of the ancient techniques used to create paints for early Aboriginal rock art, and a brief lesson in botany: “Do you know why they call this a Dead Dog Tree?” she asks. “No bark.”

Of course, out in the desert of the Northern Territory, you’re probably more likely to come across a group of feral camels than you are wild dogs. While you ponder which one you would prefer to meet, rest assured that the federal government are doing something about this. In the sort of headline that quickly makes you realise how very far away you are from Leeds, Thursday’s NT News reveals an Egyptian businessman will construct an abattoir in South Australia with plans to process around 100,000 feral camels a year. Shipping camel meat to the Middle East will generate 250 jobs and $60 million a year.

I’ve now sat on the back of a camel twice. If the camel I encountered in Marrakech was a Ford Fiesta, then ‘Murphy’ in the Northern Territory is a Holden Commodore: a giant, snorting, 6 cylinder beast. Camels are so endearingly awkward in appearance that I’m not sure I like the thought of seeing one of them on my dinner plate. They’ve proliferated in the outback since their arrival from the Canary Islands in 1840, where they were used to help carry cargo during the building of cross-country telegraph lines. Their Afghan pilots didn’t have the heart to kill them when the work was done, so instead they let them go. Not being native to Australia and free of any serious diseases, the camel population is now increasing by some 90,000 a year. We even spot a group of them coming back from Kata Tjuta, and the desert’s a big place. The ominous array of footprints strewn across the red sand proves just how you're never quite alone when staying in the middle of nowhere.

Our final night is spent at a boisterous alfresco buffet as the sun sets over Uluru – its bright red hue altering in the twilight to a shadowy brown, before being silhouetted by the silver moon. Scott is our astronomer for the evening, pinpointing a blanket of crystal clear constellations from the Southern Cross to the rings on Saturn. I doubt there are many better places on the planet for someone like Scott to live, given the desert’s nightly palette. He has a degree in astrophysics, a masters in psychology and is about to start studying for a doctorate. His colleague Brett, however, has merely downloaded the Stargazer app for his iPhone. “You’ve wasted your time, mate,” Brett says. Scott chooses to ignore this.

Scott’s decision to up sticks and hit the desert links in with Bryson’s theory of obsession, and we find evidence of this everywhere. I talk with Heather Duff, the ‘artist in residence’ at the Ayer’s Rock Resort who travels up from Melbourne for three months every year to sell her bright Uluru landscapes. For her, the rock is a constant source of inspiration. I can only agree: the hardest part about leaving Uluru is actually forcing yourself to stop looking at it.

Honestly. Just go there.