At the end of the day we discuss where might be best to stand to get a lift home when a car drives past. We stick out a thumb and it stops. The two women inside provide a complete and utter contrast to the thoughtful, interesting and intelligent people who gave us a lift this morning. They say nothing interesting and exhibit everything that is bad about Australian culture. They are here only to be entertained and are not the slightest bit interested in listening or looking or learning about the place they have come to visit. They refer to Kata Tjuta by the name of another, unrelated national park and are unfamiliar with the name “Yulara”, the town we are all staying at, the one they flew in to, the only one within 500 kilometres of here. One of the women regretted not chipping off a bit of the rock as a souvenir, her only reservation that it would have been too much weight in her already overloaded suitcase. Their heads are still in Melbourne and they are not interested or able to change that.
That’s what happens with air travel. You just pop in to somewhere 2,000 km away and your head is still wherever you left a couple of hours ago. We saw it in Dubai after travelling through Iran and now we’re seeing it here. If you arrive by road you arrive tired and smelly and appreciate the distance you’ve travelled and where you are. Arriving in Yulara was the first time we saw a shop or had mobile phone reception for several days. We were amazed there was any civilisation out here at all. These people who have just flown in have never left it. They don’t really get that they’re in the middle of the desert and instead just complain at the lack of convenient toilets.
It’s a real problem. Not everyone has a week to drive to Uluru and back. But if you don’t do it that way, if you don’t drive for days through the desert, if you just drop in from the sky for the weekend, which is what most people do, then you don’t really see what’s here. You think you do. You see a big rock with sand around it and take a photo from the designated photo taking place and check it off your bucket list—congratulations, you’re now a real Australian—but you stay in your fucking resort hotel and go to your light show in the evening and watch your artificial aboriginal “cultural” dance show and sip your fucking cappuccino and drive on the newly paved roads and make calls on your phone and don’t really understand that all the other roads out here aren’t paved and there isn’t phone reception and there aren’t any shops or hotels or light shows or fucking cappuccinos and that you haven’t really seen what’s out here at all.
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The car isn’t fixed on Tuesday. Parts are required and they will take days to get here from Adelaide.
One evening we chat with our neighbours at the campsite. They’re a farming couple with three kids on a six week trip. We exchange travel tips and talk about farming, solar energy, Europe, aboriginal issues. They farm sheep and crops and the whole family agrees they can’t live without the wide open space. I can relate. I think about the end of our trip and our life in Europe afterwards.
Another evening a couple turn up with a huge camper truck with slide out rooms towing a giant boat. The guy asks where the water is to stick his boat in and laughs. It’s pretty funny. The next day the couple leave early and give us their still partially valid three day pass to the park so we hitch hike in again to take the same photo as everyone else at the sunset photo taking location. Wouldn’t want to miss that. The next day we go to the cafe and drink a cappuccino.
Finally the truck is ready and we can leave. It’s late in the afternoon—nearly dark actually—but we’re fed up with the place and want to get out. By the time we get to the highway it’s dark, which is never a good time to drive in the bush unless you like decorating the front of your car with dead animals, but we risk it for 25 kilometres and then pull off into the sand and find a spot to camp.