Ayers Rock 1: Driving on the left

On the morning of September 13th, we took off from Cairns and headed off into the continent, where the features below us were constantly changing but it was all one, big, desert. In-flight entertainment, in between episodes of “Deadwood,” was a production preview of Baz Luhrman’s new movie “Australia” with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. We passed into the central time zone, which is a half-hour behind eastern (but 90 minutes ahead of western), and landed at Ayers Rock Airport.

As the plane descended into the dead center of the continent, we got our first glimpses of Ayers Rock (aka Uluru, note the underline) and its companion monoliths, the Olgas (aka Kata Tjuta). Get to those in a bit.

The airport at Ayers Rock is pretty damn small. It’s a little disconcerting cause you don’t even see it coming; you’re just dropping into the desert, getting closer and closer, and at the last possible second a runway comes into view and you land.

Once the plane comes to a stop, you turn around and taxi back up the runway to the terminal. Then they roll up the steps - steps! - and you step out onto the tarmac. The terminal building is slightly bigger than a large family home, with a single baggage carousel and parking for maybe 100 cars and 12 tour buses out front. It all helps to establish how far from civilization you are.

Then came one of the most harrowing parts of the trip - time to pick up our rental car, the one with the steering wheel on the right-hand side.

We were just cozy enough with the notion of which way to look when crossing the street. Actually driving down the street, though, was a scary proposition; but if you’re gonna do it, might as well do it in the wide-open desert, yes?

Hertz handed over the keys to a shiny new Toyota Corolla, with a stick shift for added challenge. I sat in the driver’s seat, adjusted the rear-view mirror (to my left!) and slowly backed out of the space.

Thankfully, the pedals were in the right order. Stick-shifting with my left hand took some getting used to. When it came to turns, I just acted like a 16-year-old and checked every mirror and every direction to avoid another car coming from any direction.

(A side story: another interesting thing is that people on the sidewalk and elsewhere also seem to pass on the left. That also took some getting used to.)

Funnily, my biggest challenge had nothing to do with driving, but rather signalling. The windshield wipers are to the left of the wheel, and the turn signals to the right; as a result, for pretty much the entire time, I was instinctively firing off the wipers when I meant to use the signals. It marked me unmistakably as a tourist. But then, there weren’t many locals about, come to think of it.

After driving the 10 km to the Ayers Rock Resort, it was time for the second big challenge of the day: dragging Mary Beth, kicking and screaming, into our [thunder clap] TENT.

The nice folks at the Campground handed over a key to the tent, and an electric lantern. MB looked at the lantern as though it might bite her. Then we walked to our tent, a sturdy 9×12 tent with a covered “porch.” Inside was a tiled floor, sealed to the outside; two beds on metal frames; chairs; and even a little nightstand. In short, the nicest tent that you or I have ever stayed in.

We opened the windows to ventilate the tent; the weather was only in the low 80s, pretty much perfect for the desert. Given a few hours to kill, we pulled out the computer and watched an hour or two more of “Deadwood.” Then, it was time to put on warmer clothes and get picked up for dinner.

Our evening’s food was the so-called Sounds of Silence sunset dinner. I’ll apologize ahead of time for forgetting my camera back at the tent.

A tour bus came around at 5:30 and picked us and other tourists up for the trip out to the dinner site. As the sun ran down the sky, the buses headed out on a dirt road labeled “SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY,” with Ayers Rock on one side of us and Kata Tjuta in the other direction. We were let off at the base of a low sand dune, with a railed walk winding up to the top. There we found a professional didgeridoo player and some Ayers Rock staff handing out glasses of cheap champagne. We watched the sun set to the northeast. Ayers Rock slowly dimmed from reddish to gray. Kata Tjuta, against the setting sun, cut a sharp and bizarre outline. It was impossible to get a gauge on how big either one was; they could have been one or ten miles away, but they were impossible to miss.

Once the sun went down, we followed the trail down the other side of the dune and found dinner tables set up for all the tourists (over a hundred of us, I think). There was no lighting besides a single candle in the center of each table.

As I ran off to the bathroom, Mary Beth did a masterwork of finding us some good people to share the tables with. (This mostly consisted of addressing those around her in line: “Does anyone else NOT wanna sit with children?”) So we found ourselves with four other couples. From left to right, they hailed from Boston, Vermont, Iceland, and London, and were all right around our age. We all hit it off amazingly well.

Conversation was the first order of the evening, chit-chatting about how we found ourselves out there in the middle of the desert. The five couples represented four honeymoons and one (the London couple) long-term backpackers celebrating a birthday. The Americans, of course, talked the most.

The sky went from blue to gray to black and commanded more and more of our attention. A new moon, invisible before sunset, now stood out low on the horizon, and even the dark side stood out against the sky as clearly as a full moon would in Texas. The stars came out, and the Milky Way shone plain as day from horizon to horizon.

Here’s the part where even if I did have the camera, it wouldn’t have been any use. It’s one thing to see a big fancy picture of a zillion stars. It’s another to actually be looking at the zillion stars above you. You can even see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, standing out like little tufts of the Milky Way to the southeast. Other galaxies! In the sky! Just sitting there!

We did have dinner throughout all this wonderment: kangaroo and crocodile (and more conventional things like beef) which were all pretty tasty. Afterwards the staff came around and blew out our candles, leaving us in utter blackness, and our “presenter” came out with his booming voice to educate us all in the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Using a flashlight and laser, which in the pitch blackness shot out like lightsabers, he showed off Southern Hemisphere constellations.

After the lesson, we got to walk over to three telescopes set up and look at the stars up-close: the double stars of Alpha Centauri, the moons of Jupiter, etc etc. It was an amazing thing. Both Mary Beth and I finally understood why I was so excited about flying into the middle of the desert.

By this time we and our four other couples had gotten to know each other (and our glasses of wine) quite well. We stuck around in the increasing cold until around 10:00 when we caught the last bus back to the resort.

And then [WHUMP] we plopped in bed.