Uluru and Kata Tjuta

More of Wed
We arrived at Uluru at around lunchtime. We had passed another big red rock on the way called Atilla. In fact there are three sets of rocks all in an East - West line across the desert (the third being The Olgas or Kata Tjuta) caused by a corregating effect caused by the pushing of the continent from the north and south (whilst Australia was still connected to Antarctica). Uluru actually got tipped up on its end (practically, its sedimentary layers are nearly 90 degrees to the horizontal). According to the Dreamtime stories Atilla was formed when a giant ancestor sat down and squashed a rock flat. Uluru was formed by two ancestor children building sandcastles as they waited for their mother who was do a woman's ceremony. They got stuck on the top of their sandcastle and had to slide down the edges and have left their finger marks on the sides as they slid. You can clearly see these marks and now the water flows down these grooves.
Rain, Uluru story - tribe at site for male initiation ceremony, children and their mothers' cave, men's cave, women's cave, elders' cave, stick on top of Uluru. Other tribe invites them to their ceremony but they can't break their ceremony so have to decline, other tribe offended and send a very powerful being to take revenge disguised as a dingo. He waits to attack but the Kingfisher sees him and calls out a warning, the women with the children start running and run straight into the male ceremonial area, they start running but the dingo manages to get to a couple of them. In the end the people are all running around the base of Uluru and then off to the south to try to escape the dingo. He is held up by a brave warrior but the warrior is eventually defeated and the dingo tracks can be seen around the base of Uluru where he starts the chase again..... if we want to know what happens next we have to go to the south to the tribes down there who will be guardians of the story that takes place in their lands (very frustrating).
We walk around the base in the spitting rain past the caves and rock art sites. There are many sites that are sacred to the aboriginals of the area and so they request that no photos are taken. Because of the rain the colour of Uluru was a dark purplish instead of red in rain and there were some small waterfalls running down the finger gouges of the ancestors.
Other parts of Uluru have a creation story of the snake who returns here with her eggs (apparently there is a python round here that can carry her eggs, she rolls in them and they stick around her neck), she arrives and leaves her eggs and then hears that her nephew the brown snake has been attacked and wounded by some other snakes on the other side of Uluru, she rushes round the base of the rock leaving marks in the rock as she goes (deep grooves and overhangs in the rock), she arrives at the waterhole and finds that her nephew was wounded and then left to die. According to aboriginal law if you wound someone (even if it is legitimate punishment, e.g. spearing someone in the leg for adultery) then the attacker must nurse the 'victim' back to health (this then stops tit for tat revenge attacks), so the snake was very angry that her nephew had not been looked after. She turned into a woman with a snake spirit and sat on the rock trying to calm herself. One of the snakes that attacked her nephew was sitting on the other side of the water hole and she asked him why he hadn't helped her nephew and the snake replied that he didn't know. She smacked him over the head with her digging stick leaving a big mark in the rock. She tried to calm herself and threw some dirt behind her in a symbolic gesture of trying to put her troubles behind her leaving a dark patch on the rocks. She asked again and received a laugh in return so she whacked him again and broke off his nose. You can still see the snake on the rock and then the place where she turned into the woman - she left marks where she knelt, a hole where her digging stick had been stuck into the ground and an impression of her pichi (carrying basket).
In the evening we ate Kangaroo mince spaghetti bolgnaise (tasty!) and then set up our swags under a shelter to avoid the rain.

Thurs
Up in the dark, we drove to Kata TJuta (The Olgas) for sunrise, it was still raining on and off, too much cloud around for spectacular sunrise colours but clouds were dramatic and impressive billowing above the majestic domes of the red rocks. We took a walk between some of the domes through spectacular scenery in the Valley of the Winds. The rock structure is very different to Uluru which has smoothish small grained sandstone. Here there is large rocked conglomerate, but still the same reddish colour. There were loads of birds including a very busy Bower bird who was flitting about and calling out trying to impress a female. We spotted a Euro, a smallish kangaroo / wallaby that lives in these rocky areas and has a face that looks very Koalaish. At one place in the centre there was an abundance of greenery including a carnivourous plant with sticky long thin leaves and an abundance of dead butterflies and flies that had become entangled in its sticky trap. There were also loads of plants that we haven't seen before, small orchid like flowers and trees with berries.
We returned to take a final drive around Uluru and then to the airport to catch our 1.15pm flight to Perth.
At the airport we said our farewells to Steve and then managed to get on the internet for the first time in days to find that the campervan we had booked was not going to be available until Friday rather than today. The email had been sent 4 days previous and said something along the lines of, 'please confirm that this will be ok or if you no longer wish to have the campervan at all then that is fine'. Of course, we had not replied and by the time I managed to get in touch with them even the one day late van had gone so we arrived in Perth with nothing booked and nowhere to go. We ended up in a hotel in the middle of town and have found a place that will be able to give us a van tomorrow. We managed to do all the washing that has been building up with red dust all over it - evidence of our trip to the 'Red Centre' is now all but gone.