A Little Bit of Everything

Uluru, a sacred Aboriginal Australian sandstone dome.

Yesterday, we flew into Uluru, a very, very, very, very small town in the Northern Territory of Australia.  You may have heard of Ayers Rock or Uluru, the large sandstone formation for which the town a named.  We woke up bright and early at five AM to ride camels around the rock and enjoy the beautiful sunrise.  The camels we rode were single-humped camels (dromedary camels) which have adapted differently from their bactrian camel cousins (two-humped camels) to live in hotter climates.

My mom and I rode a camel named Pete.

Camels were brought to Australia by explorers in the early 1800s and were used to carry humans and goods across the country.  When railways replaced the camels, the government declared that if you owned a camel, you either needed to pay for a camel permit, or shoot the animals.  The farmers, who didn't want to do either one, let their camels go in the wild where they lived without any natural predators.  The camels have thrived and now, today, the rule for acquiring a camel is, "If you can catch it, you can keep it." You don't need to pay anything.

Quandong seeds: Best spread by Emu droppings, not camels.

After that, we took a nature tour where, among other things, we saw a native peach tree called Quandong.  It grows lipstick red, dry fruits similar to peaches.  Naturally, the emus would eat the fruit and swallow the pit whole, releasing and planting the new plant through its waste.  Unfortunately, camels also love this tree, but when they ingest the fruits, they crush the seed so it can't grow a new tree.  This has lead to a decrease in the population of the tree and put it on the endangered species list.  Ty contrast, there are about 750,000 wild camels in Australia, more than any other country.

Today, we also took an Aboriginal art class.  Aboriginal art uses symbols to represent things from people to animal tracks.  Another part of this style is using small dots to color the painting.  These are made traditionally with sticks, but today with the end of a paint brush.  Most Aboriginal art is painted from an aerial view, with different colors representing the different landscapes.

Kata Tjuta in the afternoon light

Next, we took a bus out into the desert (which is actually considered semi-arid because they receive over 200 ml of water a year) to see two rock formations.  The bigger of the two was called Kata Tjuta (kahtah jootah), a conglomerate rock formation formed from the erosion of mountains.  It consists of four main domes and many smaller domes and boulders around them.  The second rock formation was called Uluru, or Ayers Rock, as the fist European explorers called it.  It was formed in the same way as Kata Tjuta, but because it is made of sandstone, it eroded much quicker.  It is a monolith, unlike Kata Tjuta.  All of Uluru is sacred to the Aborigines, while only parts of Kata Tjuta are sacred to them.  However, woman don't even like to look a Kata Tjuta, so only men go there.

The Southern Cross, as viewed from Uluru, Australia

To finish our day, we went star gazing, and looked at some things from a telescope.  We started by recognizing constellations, some of which were upside down because they were named in the Northern Hemisphere by the Ancient Greeks.  Some 70% of the sky is visible in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and the rest are specific to one or the other.  For example people in the Southern Hemisphere don't see the big or small dipper or the North Star.  On the flip side, people in the Southern Hemisphere see a constellation called the Southern Cross, which appears on the Australian flag.  We also saw the MilkyWay and another dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan.  Through the telescopes, we saw two nebula, two star clusters, Jupiter (plus two moons), and our own moon.

Today was  a busy day, but everything we did was absolutely amazing.