I found it a strange experience to visit a place so iconic as Uluru. To have seen endless photos and video images of the rock in all its immensity, and to even wonder if having it seen it so many times, whether in fact it was even necessary to visit? We each, surreptitiously, prepared ourselves for disappointment, or a feeling of underwhelm.
We came the back way, the far lesser travelled Great Central Rd, where we’d seen a handful of travellers on the road, some from nearby Aboriginal communities and only a few travellers like us. So we knew we’d be shocked by the mayhem of Yulara – and we were.
But before that, we were immediately captivated by Kata Tjuta, from the moment it first peaked over the horizon, the enormous rounded rocks were glowing a dark ruby red in the afternoon light. From the west there were three pronounced rounded domes, enromous and imperious. Kata Tjuta had nothing like the immediate visual recognition of Uluru for us, and so as it appeared and disappeared from view in front of us we felt like we were discovering it anew.
Then we came close to Uluru and I think we both said WOW. Unironically. Just wow. It has such an undeniable presence. It demands recognition and awe. I’m sure I’m not the first to say how much bigger and more dominating it is in reality as opposed to photos, where to capture it all, you need zoom right out.
We tried to get to know these places as well as we could in two short days. We went on the Ranger guided walk at the base of Uluru with the excellent James, a Pitjinjarra man. We circumnavigated the base of Uluru on a crazily windy day. We lined up with everone else to watch the sunset and sunrise.
But it was our walks amongst Kata Tjuta that moved us both the most. Firstly, walking up in between two high domes we’d seen from our westerly approach. Into the shade and relative darkness, to the waterhole at the top of the gorge. It seemed to me that everyone else there was a little quieter than usual, and there were moments I could feel my skin prickling, the hairs standing on end. It seemed like everyone else was feeling the same reverence I was. And then a young guy ignored all the signs saying ‘This is a sacred place, please don’t climb the domes’ and clambered up the side of a dome to pose for his girlfriend, in an admittedly enticing circular cave.
We then did the longer walk through Kata Tjuta, where we encountered only a handful of other people. This led us through the middle of the domes to some places that almost made me want to cry. Even now, thinking about these places, my heart is a little closer to the surface.
These are thin places, where the barrier between the earthly and the sacred is at its most permeable. I’m reading a book Thin Places right now, by Kerri ni Dochartaigh, and she writes so evocatively about thin places in Ireland.
In these places you might experience the material and spiritual coming together. Blood, worry and loss might sit together under the same tree as silence, stillness and hope… Places where a veil is lifted away and light streams in, where you see a boundary between worlds disappear right before your eyes, places where you are allowed to cross any border, where borders and boundaries hold no sway….
They are places that make us feel something larger than oursleves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.
[There is alot of advice at Uluru and Kata Tjuta about appropriate behaviour. And many places that are not to be photographed. And all these special places in the middle of Kata Tjuta are in the no photography zone.]