This is becoming quite a series… Which isn’t over just yet despite the warmer temperatures in Sydney this past week.
I baked this Orange and almond slice for a weekend lunch with some friends. I actually stuffed it up (hadn’t figured out how to cream butter and sugar correctly when it’s freezing in the kitchen), but thankfully the recipe is very forgiving since it tasted gorgeous when drenched in orange syrup and served with a huge dollop of cream.
In the Territory there are a lot of stretches of long, straight road. This one at least goes somewhere (ie. to Uluru).
Not a lot of people know that there’s a third much forgotten monolith after Uluru and Kata Tjuta – Mount Conner. Our tour guide nicknamed it Fooluru since tourists often mistaken it for the other rock – at least from a distance.
Funnily enough, the local Aboriginals tend to give this rock a bit of a miss, too. It’s a place of bad vibes, apparently. It’s also on private land so there’s nary a tourist facility in sight aside from a roadside lookout.
Now this was rather decadent cake to bake – a flourless chocolate cake with port! Completely luscious and pathetically easy to make as long as you know how to separate eggs, melt chocolate and use a beater. Don’t forget the cream. Some berries would be lovely, too.
I posted about Gerringong sometime ago but neglected to post about Gerroa, an even tinier village a few k’s south.
Gerroa amenities consist entirely of one general store and one cafe, but that doesn’t seem to bother the locals, who built houses on the peninsula just to marvel everyday the wonderful Seven Mile Beach.
What does the Australian desert look like? Something like this:
Dried up lake, spinifex, mulga, and red, red earth.
I got a closer look at the domes of Kata Tjuta later in the morning on the Valley of the Winds walk. It was a wonderful walk that wound its way in and around the domes, giving a really good perspective of their sheer size. At that time of the morning the walk was also very quiet. I liked having the track almost to myself doing a real bushwalk, unlike the Uluru walks.
There were a few winter flowers out, but like everything in the Territory, they were variations from what we have down south.
In the end this was probably my favourite walk in the Red Centre. It was a place that really exceeded my expectations because it’s simply a very beautiful and awe-inspiring place that still managed to feel wild and remote.
We might not have gotten the red glow of sunrise on Kata Tjuta, but the domes looked mighty fine nevertheless: mysterious, alien-like things rising out of the desert. This photo really shows the true scale of things. The desert oaks in the foreground are only 4 – 5 metres tall while the highest dome in Kata Tjuta is over 500 metres tall.
We were up early the next morning, trying to catch Kata Tjuta (formerly known as the Olgas) at sunrise. But again, the elements conspired against us. Rain during the night meant that the cloud cover was substantial at dawn, but this time it actually made for a spectacular sunrise over Uluru, which was 30km distant.
My first glimpse of Uluru.
It was a strange seeing something so iconic: so familiar and yet not because I have never seen it in context. In pictures, I saw the red rock, but in reality there was also the red sand, desert oaks, spinifex and bloodwood.
Of course, being there in person also means that I saw the true reality of the rock: that it is a high profile tourist destination with a cultural centre, souvenir shops, and climb.
At the end of the day we gathered to watch the sunset. Unfortunately the sun was obscured by clouds, hence the muted colours. Well, you can’t have everything.
Static and Silence 