Travel with Indigo

Back in Adelaide, Kitty departed for home in Florida partly due to some prior commitments and partly to give Grant and me some buddy time together.  After a three and a half hour flight from Adelaide to the Red Center of Australia, Grant and I landed nearly dead center in the continent of Australia at Yulara, a village whose sole purpose is to serve visitors to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. This part of the country, an unimaginably vast empty desert, gets its name, the Red Center, thanks to heavy concentrations of iron oxide in its soils and rocks. There is so much of the stuff here that some rocks are actually encrusted with scales of rust.

Uluru, also known as Ayer’s Rock, and Kata Tjuta are the aboriginal names for the two enormous, smooth surfaced and strikingly red rock formations that comprise the principal attractions of the park, both of these sacred and still revered in the pantheon of the aboriginals. There we spent four days and three nights—quite long enough, thank you—at the splendid safari camp-style Longitude 132 resort, our home base for tours of the iconic rocks, surely the most photographed natural wonders in the country.

Our guide was—I’m not making this up—half Irish and half aboriginal. With him leading the way, we toured Uluru, walking partly around its base at sunrise, a spectacular time of day in this endless desert but damn cold and breezy in July I can tell you. We also stood on a low rise near our resort and watched the sun set while suitably shielded from the elements by a few cocktails. As we drove from one sacred rock pile (forgive the diminution) to the other, your ever alert and keen eyed writer spotted a herd of feral camels grazing among the desert roughage. These were imported into Australia in the nineteenth century as a means of crossing the woop woop. Today there is something like a million of the creatures wandering around in the Red Center.