Urban poetry

I did post several pictures of this at the time: Hosier Lane in Melbourne, considered to be the best place to see street art in a city that's apparently famous for it. But here are a few more.

Flashback: Simpsons Gap

Before I leave the outback—for real this time—here's one last rock formation, this one in Simpsons Gap, near Alice Springs. Never mind aliens--these rocks look like they're screaming.

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.

Flashback: Kangaroos

Finishing up my trip down Outback Memory Lane with some kangaroos from the sanctuary in Alice Springs.

Flashback: Standley Chasm

Many of the remaining pictures from the outback are landscapes of red sand with rocks and a few unhappy trees, and I think you get the idea without having to actually see them.

But I liked these pictures from Standley Chasm, near Alice Springs, because of how green and (deceptively) cool the landscape appears. You still needed a face net for the flies.

Flashback: Uluru–Just to be clear

This is Uluru: rounded top, steep sides.

(↓) That is not Uluru. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Flashback: Fooluru

 

That's obviously not Uluru—the shape is all wrong—but if you've been driving through the desert from Alice Springs for four hours and you see that big rocky shape in the distance, you could be forgiven for getting a little excited. I did!

But that's Mount Connor, also known as Fooluru.

Flashback: Uluru up close and from a distance

The path to the monolith from the Visitor Center, and the view at sunset. It's fascinating how all of the curves and complications at the base are invisible from a distance. It just looks like a big, pretty rock.

Flashback: Climbing Uluru

Humans love to climb things; sometimes the stupider and more dangerous an activity is, the longer the line of idiots clamouring to try it will be. Climbing Uluru has always been very dangerous; at least 35 people have died attempting it. (An ironic side note: Lindy Chamberlain, the woman who was convicted of murder after her baby daughter was killed by a dingo at Uluru, was finally exonerated after a climber fell to his death there and searchers looking for his body discovered the baby's jacket near some dingo dens.)

But in addition to being dangerous—and the fact that there's really nothing to see from up there except flat, mostly featureless outback in every direction—climbing Uluru was also disrepectful to the owners, the Aṉangu people, to whom it is sacred. They requested for decades that visitors respect their traditions by not climbing (and also not leaving their garbage and shit at the summit if they did) but it wasn't actually forbidden until 2019.

In 2016 people were still climbing, and if you look closely at the picture on the left you can see a few of them. The picture on the right zooms in on a few climbers taking a break, sitting on that hot, sun-baked rock. Definitely not my idea of a good time.

Flashback: Uluru flora

There had been an unusual amount of rain the year I was there, so it's possible that you wouldn't always see these flowers and grasses among the sandstone.