It Might be a Camel

Those of you who are Frank Zappa fans might remember this title from one of his songs on the Hot Rats album, but it has a double meaning for our story today. Ever since I mistook a large dead log laying in a rural New South Wales paddock for a bull, I have been the subject of ridicule by Ronald for both my bad eyesight and my “Look at the size of that bull!” declaration. This time Ronald made a similar declaration, with much different results, but we will get to that in a minute.

On day two of our visit to the center of the continent, we rose to find a somewhat chilly, windy dawn and no time for breakfast beyond a few “bird seed bars” that we had bought before our trip. Ronald drove us back into the national park, but this time we took a different road to go to Kata Tjuta, a group of strange, bare rock mountains visible in the distance from Uluru. We got to the first hiking point in good order and proceeded down the “Valley of the Winds” loop trail, a rocky passage that takes hikers deep into narrow canyons flanked by almost vertical walls of strange, conglomerate rock. Geologists might cringe at that last description, but I can only tell you that these mountains look as if they are giant concrete castings, with a mortar of sandstone holding together millions of smaller rocks as if they had been set by a stone mason.

The hike was much more demanding than the cakewalk we took around Uluru, and we had to scramble over many giant ledges of slanting rock surface where the trail was simply indicated by a few plastic arrows set into the ground. The canyons themselves were beautiful and lush with trees and undergrowth, all taking advantage of the rock walls’ ability to collect the sparse rainfall and gather it into the deep channels below. We kept seeing large piles of “scat” (a polite term) along the trail, and we thought they were the result of passing kangaroos, but the turds were somewhat large for that animal and set us to speculating. We encountered lots of other hikers, some with ridiculous fly nets around their heads to ward off the myriad insects that infest the place, but really the wind was making such precautions unnecessary. One fellow took a group photo of your intrepid explorers, and I believe it may be posted on Ron’s blog.


Once we regained our car we began the drive to the second hike, a short trail to the end of a massive gorge further along in this small mountain range. While Jane was at the wheel, Ronald had the leisure to survey the surrounding countryside. Whist so engaged, he declared, “Look, there is a camel!” and I was sure that he was again putting my mistaken bullock sighting up for a few laughs. Not so. There, out in an open area about two hundred yards away, a wild camel was resting and chewing its cud. Jane stopped the car, allowing Jayne and Ronald to go out and approach the beast (perhaps closer than they should have in Ronald’s case) and got some fantastic pictures before the camel rose and meandered off.

Our final hike up the gorge was a short stroll up an easy trail that ended in a box canyon. More of the giant ‘roo poop was seen, but now we were convinced it was the camel’s droppings, especially when we saw a few small pools of standing water along the canyon floor. When we reached the end of the trail and were sitting quietly, I heard a clattering that was somewhat alarming and realized that a rock had come loose from the canyon wall above and had crashed down to the canyon floor with lethal speed. With all that cement work holding together these massive rocks it was to be expected, but unnerving nonetheless.

The rest of our time in the Ayer’s Rock Resort was spent in two major activities: hanging out in the Pioneer Bushman’s pub and searching for a geocache treasure without the benefit of a handheld GPS device. We tried to pinpoint the treasure’s location using Google Earth and the map coordinates and had a pretty good idea which ridge to search, but we had no success the first day. On our last morning, armed with clues we got from other finder’s photographs, Jayne made her first geocache find and we all made our way to the hidden loot. We signed the logbook and left two American coins for the next finder, and took a small globe keychain for our pains.