Thinking Allowed: Visiting with Uluru and Kata Tjuta

Coming to Uluru makes really makes a person think about the tourism industry. Here we all are in the middle of the desert in an artificial resort town to see a rock. A really big fascinating rock but nonetheless a rock. After being at an isolated camel station for a few days showing up at Uluru feels like the big city – there is phone reception and air conditioning and a grocery store, a hair salon, an airport, room service and busloads of tourists all frittering to and fro. Aside from the aboriginals who call this land home there was no city or town before the resort set up shop. This rock has such a big fan club that it is nothing less than a rockstar giving daily sunrise and sunset performances to masses of international followers and unprofessional paparazzi.

But I mean no disrespect to Uluru because it is an amazing piece of geology. It is a massive slab of reddish sandstone that looks like it fell from the heavens and plonked itself into the desert. It is a true island mountain, or inselberg if you are into words. I went for a walk around its mass – a sort of quasi religious feeling circling of its eminence and what struck me as most fascinating was that when I arrived before sunrise and touched the stone it was hot.

Given the masses of people who come out here each year you can imagine the impact on both Uluru and the aboriginal community. A lot has been done to try to create a more environmentally and culturally sensitive tourism approach to minimize the negative impact on the sacred rock. The biggest effort is to minimize the number of people actually climbing up the rock face. But I didn’t really need to climb up because to me what was even more fascinating than the climb was the approach taken to get people to decide not to climb which has been very successful. This was a multi-step process involving foremost notices everywhere saying that it is a sacred site and the community asks that you respect them by not climbing. This was the gentle approach. I took one of the Please Don’t Climb Leaflets. The front of the page lists cultural, safety, and environmental reasons to not climb. Then comes the peer pressure approach of fewer people are doing it so you shouldn’t either. Then they list all the alternative walking tracks. If none of this has made an impact they go over the risks and safety precautions. Just in case that doesn’t work they have the opening times of when you can climb which due to the current heat is between 7 and 8am. They then list all the other reasons they might close the climb with little notice: heat, rain, storms, wind, wet, cloud, rescue, culture leaving you to realize that even if you did want to climb the walk is likely never open anyhow. Then comes more safety precautions and ways to avoid risking your life in case the above did not deter you and to remind you that 35 people have died on the mountain. This is an amazing document and I would so like to meet whoever wrote it because it is genius! So what I have learned from Uluru is a whole new parenting strategy that I am quite hopeful about that I have named permissive but guilty. It might go something like this: Kids if you want to eat candy today that is fine with me. I really feel you shouldn’t though as there are so many other wonderful things you can eat and the risk of sugar to your beautiful teeth is pretty high. And I am quite sure none of your friends are eating candy anymore. The few things I ask of you if do decide to eat the candies is that you make sure to eat them at least two hours before or two hours after meals, avoid eating them if we are having pasta for dinner or bread with any meal or if there is a full or new moon. And if you are going to eat them make sure not to choke because there have been many children whose live have ended after choking on candy.