I am basically an adult now

(taken with the laptop camera, so a little lo-res)

After  many hundreds of dollars, dozens of hours of training and untold induced heart attacks, the Motor Vehicles Registry has seen fit to issue me with a license to drive a motor vehicle.

God help us all.

To get my license in time to help with the driving for our desert job, I had to go to Yulara, which is a very strange place. Yulara is basically the resort for tourists who want to visit Uluru or for those rare ones with taste who want to see Kata Tjuta (which is a far more interesting rock formation that is not that far away).

That observation about Kata Tjuta (known as the Olgas to whitefellahs) was going to be an aside but I'll spend a little longer on it now. Emma's previous post was about the weirdness about Yulura and the strange choice of perspective of Uluru that means everyone's seen it a million times from that same angle even if they never come here. In addition to that, it's just a large samey sort of rock. I mean, that's not bad. It's nice as far as that goes. But you can't really spend that much time looking at it.

But Kata Tjuta is awesome. It's not just one rock, it's dozens of the things. In the local language it means "many heads" and it absolutely looks like the grisly remains of some Dreamtime titanic decapitation session. Every bit of it, every angle, every structure is unique. I can't show you a picture because the camera in the laptop is too weak to go that distance, but one view is the background of our blog. That gives you some idea.

You can spend hours on it. And, as a side note, the locals have no problems with people climbing on it or swimming in the water holes within it's byzantine tunnels (unlike Uluru which is sacred to locals and they'd really prefer if you didn't crawl all over it).*

And it's just down the road but most tourists prefer Uluru and prefer to crawl all over it. 

Anyway, this is related to my license because today we were meant to leave Yulara. I was going to do the first leg. I put the P-plates on, climbed in the Landcruiser, turned the key and ... nothing. The AANT guy said the alternator is shot and we have to wait until at least Monday and probably Tuesday before we can leave.

A forced stay in a resort doesn't sound like punishment but when everything to do here is aimed at people who would prefer to see a rock they've seen 1000 times before and pay $35 to cook meat on their own Aussie BBQ and you can't go to Kata Tjuta because your car is broken down... well it's not as much fun as it could be.

Which all sounds a little too much like adulthood, huh?

* You can swim at Kata Tjuta but you are warned that giants will try to drown you and eat you, according to "Strict Rules" the book about the Blackfellah/Whitefellah tour by Midnight Oil and Warumpi Band. You can risk death but it doesn't insult the locals, unlike climbing Uluru.