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From Our travel agent booked us rooms In Alice Springs, believing it a manageable drive to Uluru. I intuitively felt the need to check this out before we left home, and immediately found that this four to five hour one way commute was impossible on a daily basis. There was extremely comfortable though quite expensive lodging available at Ayers Rock Resort, so I directly booked us five nights there. Amazingly, this was the longest consecutive night's stay that we had in any of our hotels and inns throughout our three month journey! We settled into our luxury accommodations and from our room's patio enjoyed a peaceful view of the distant Uluru, shimmering in the desert heat. The buffet meals were gourmet, and of wonderful quality. We relaxed and felt ourselves connect to the land, and the site, deeply. We first visited the park's Cultural Center, and found it quite amazing. The local ways and wares were honored, as should be the customs and creations of the oldest culture in the world. I found the videos of the native women enchanting. Their songs and dances were deeply meaningful. They were totally comfortable in their upper body nakedness, and their enormous pendulous breasts, hanging below their skirt waists, carried forth the grace of their movements. My relationship with bras has never been quite the same. They make the female body shape appear so contrived and harnassed. The natural ways of these women, at peace with their bodies, strongly impacted me. Clothing of any kind is a European introduction in Australia. We ventured out into the dark and still desert our first sticky-hot night, and reveled in the apparent lack of any thorned species of plants. After dealing with the formidable thorns and spikes of Arizona's desert flora, this lack of anything threatening felt fabulous. It was such a simple, yet profound pleasure to walk in the dark desert sand and not get stuck on anything. The night sky left us breathless. We felt light and free in the sounds of silence that enveloped us. In the intense sunlight of the following brutally hot day, we attended a walk and talk given by two aborigines at the base of Uluru. We were near a large pool of water fed by a source that falls directly down the vertical rock face. Our guides were part of a local tour company that features native emplyees. They spoke of their customs at length, as well as the deep end honoring connection they had to the land. Their land and fire management practices were being accepted by the local rangers, finally, after years of disastrous attempts to "manage" the area. Their ways included ingenious, controlled fires that prevented conflagrations. They seemed quite content interfacing with curious tourists all day.
What astounded us completely was their apparent immunity to the swarms of buzzing flies that hounded all humans courageous enough to endure the blistering heat. We resorted to wearing fine weaved nets over our hats to protect our faces and necks from the insistent creatures. We laughed when we first saw these nets on tourists, but developed an instant need for them once we set foot outside. Though the flies may have been a nuisance to the local clans, our guides barely extended any effort to so much as swat them away from their facial orifices. These were strong and brave people. After a few hours in the blazing heat, hounded by hundreds of flies, we were in need of the cool shelter of our room. We took regular breaks to avoid insanity from the insects, and heatstroke from the sun. I can still hear the incessant buzzing in my ears, and feel the irritating tickles and itches on my skin and eyes. The most vivid memory, unfortunately, is the taste, texture and vibration of many an inadvertently swallowed, still buzzing fly.
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