After spending a few days enjoying the Great Barrier Reef at Lizard Island, we flew to Ayers Rock by way of Cairns. What a contrast! A tropical climate, lapping waves and lovely serene white sand beaches gave way to the warm dry conditions, sandstone monuments and gorgeous red sand of the heart of Australia.
Uluru, aka Ayers Rock was so much bigger than I expected. When we flew in from Cairns, we could see it in the air, though the dust as it rose above the desert. It loomed as a massive red monolith, with a surface marked by eons of erosion from wind. There was little of the vertical water channels in evidence as seen in wetter climates. But we were in for a treat. On our first night, a storm raged, the sky glowed and flickered, jagged bolts flashed and the rains came down in torrents
As a naturalist I was really interested in hearing how Ulura formed and I think it’s an interning story. So I’ll tell to you as our guide Gareth told it to me. Five hundred million years ago, there was a large mountain range in the center of Australia. Over millions of years, the sides of the mountains eroded away and washed down the sides depositing large amount of material at the base of the mountains. Millions of year later as the mountains continued to shrink, a vast inland sea formed on top of these huge sedimentary deposits. The weight of the water from this inland sea compacted and compressed these layers and layers of debris into huge monoliths of sedimentary rock. Over time the sea shifted and moved and as it moved it caused these huge rocks to rotate and stick up of the ground. Over many more years the softer surrounding rock and soil eroded away leaving the hard compressed stone exposed. This is how Ayers Rock and Kata Tjuta were both formed.
I think that is a pretty remarkable story and the indigenous people say they have worshipped these stones since the beginning of time. I took the photo above of one of the canyon entrances to Kata Tjuta after a thunder-storm.