The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

After travelling through the outback we finally got our first glimpse of Uluru.

There are other rocks that jut out of the landscape as well. This one is known as Fooluru as it looks similar but is not Uluru.

Uluru looks much different up close.

The surface looks like bark.

Uluru is different from the other site we went to as it contains much finer sediment so it appears smoother.

This is the walking path that people use to go up and down. The number of people that climb it is very low as it is highly discouraged. Many days it is actually closed off for weather safety reasons.

The erosion patterns are so different all around the rock.

All the different shapes are used to tell different stories from the aboriginal culture.

Some regions have formed natural caves.

Other areas have several holes. How these holes form is still up for debate.

One hypothesis is lightning strikes initially make a small hole and this allows additional erosion to occur.

Some of the caves are very wide.

Others have drawings telling stories.

Others are maps to other water holes like this one.

The different caves were where different groups would gather during the day, segregated by gender and age in some cases.

The inside was very smooth.

 

The trees in this area will drop braches when it gets too dry. These are not small branches that it drops.

Uluru is very high and water collecting on the top will run down the sides into pools.

The running water probably contributes to some of the erosion.

This is one of the pools and you can see the water line. Despite it being winter and raining there is no water at the moment. Perhaps later after more rain.

The black lines highlight where the water flows down from small pool to the next small pool.

This side had many large erosion holes.

As we walked around there were a few areas that we weren’t allowed to take pictures.

The reason for this is that different areas are taboo for the other sex to see and they would like to maintain this by limiting photos of the sites so they don’t accidentally break taboo. 

In some instances there were several layers of drawings.

The more you look at it the more individual drawings can be found.

Here we are at the end of the day waiting for sunset. But sunset will have to wait for a post of its own.

This is another formation similar to Uluru but made with different sediment.

Long ago there was a river flowing through this area that carried sediment from mountains upstream.

This formation is closer to the mountains so it has larger rocks embedded and it looks a bit like red concrete.

You can see some of the rocks were pretty big.

It is much larger than Uluru and used to be a single large mount like Uluru.

Now there are several mounds spread all around.

We did the long loop to see more of them.

Sometimes Matt needs to pay more attention to the ground when Kerri yells “turn around and smile”.

It is tricky to get a picture of the whole area from the ground as it is huge.

It was beautiful out and even cool enough to need a jacket.

We were going to be rouging it the next two nights so it was important to get enough firewood to cook our food.

We ended up gathering enough for two groups. While wandering into the bush we also saw these really big spiders hanging out.