Flashback: More Kata Tjuta

It is true that, judging by these pictures, the rocks don't look quite so otherworldly up close. They look a lot like—well, rocks, or any other desert mountains not inhabited by aliens. But I do like the red sands and trees in the surrounding desert.

Flashback: Kata Tjuta

When I said that Kata Tjuta wasn't interesting up close, I may have meant that it didn't have any of the hidden nooks with waterholes and rocks and trees that you find at Uluru. And it is easier to appreciate how very strange it is when you're far enough away to see it in some context.

The name means “many heads”and those domes do look like the heads of some alien creature making itself at home in the harsh landscape.

This picture, with some tiny humans for scale, gives a little idea of how big the domes are. There are 36 of them, and the tallest, Mount Olga, is taller than Uluru.

Flashback: Oops, not so fast! (Kata Tjuta)

I wasn't finished with the outback after all.

Uluru is located in a national park with another, much less famous, rock formation: Kata Tjuta, also known as The Olgas. In 2016, I only posted one picture, taken from a distance and promised more pictures later. (I suppose ten years counts as “later.”)

I also said that Kata Tjuta, unlike Uluru, was much more interesting from a distance, but I may just have been suffering from heatstroke, or exhaustion from swatting several million flies, because while I'm not sure that “interesting” is the best adjective for these deeply strange geologic blobs, they were definitely worth taking a good look at.

The Olgas

Called Kata Tjuta by the aborigines, this is the other great sandstone formation in the national park. I have quite a few close-up pictures (though surprisingly, Kata Tjuta is the opposite of Uluru in that it's more interesting from a distance) but I'll save those for another time, when I haven't just posted a dozen pictures in a row of red sandstone surrounded by red dirt.