There must be red mud in my veins.  Wherever there is scorched red earth underfoot I feel calm, strong and at home.  I’ve visited Petra, Sedona and Puglia, but the red earth place that calls me most is Uluru in Australia. It is one of the world’s major energy vortices. Some say it is the earth’s solar plexus; the place that ‘life’ energy flows out of.  It is certainly a potent spiritual place for the Anangu Aboriginal people.

After 3 years of dreaming about it, I’ve finally got my wish and am headed to Australia  (via Hawaii) next week to write a couple of stories for work and to attend a dear friend’s wedding in Sydney.  Just thinking about it sends tingles all over my body.  I feel instinctively that Uluru must have a tremendously high vibrational field.  But perhaps that vibration doesn’t suit everyone. Two respected travel writers had very different encounters with this ruddy, 6-mile-round monolith.

Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

‘You know this rock…you feel an acquaintance with it ..somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched and stirred…you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level – perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level – and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance.

 

You cannot stop looking at it; you don’t want to stop looking at it..you realize that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time;possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it. You can see yourself in a silvery ponytail, barefoot, and in something jangly and loose fitting, hanging out with much younger visitors and telling them, “And the amazing thing is that every day it’s different, you know what I am saying? It’s never the same rock twice…Say, do you by any chance have any dope or some spare change?”

 

Jan Morris, The World:Travels 1950-2000

‘It is the most fearful of landscape, more terrible by far than Sahara or Empty Quarter, painted a queer cruel red and so corrugated by grotesque erosions that it often looks like some ominous belt of fortifications..the rock itself..the most overbearing of monoliths [and standing on top] you are poised upon an absolute pinnacle of isolation.’

But perhaps the rock gave Jan ‘the cold-shoulder’ after she climbed on it…to the aboriginal people this is sacrilege.