My first Uluru sunset was deeply personal. I didn’t want to drink a beer, laugh with my tour group, or even keep talking to Reg. It was a time for quiet reflection. When it was all over, I climbed back on the bus with everyone else and returned to our campsite.

Freezing, we all ran from the bus to the fire pit, four or five people piling up the wood and flicking their lighters. Reg disappeared to prepare our dinner, and our group circled up around the fire. Our in-house entertainment were two lovely Japanese guys named Toro and Atushi, two brothers from Osaka. "I bring my brother holiday, I teach him English," said Toro as Atushi nodded sweetly. As soon as the fire was blazing, the two brothers broke into song – Japanese, English, Japanese-English. You should hear Bon Jovi in Japanese. "Living on a Prayer" was hysterical, with Japanese verses and an English chorus. Toro and Atushi had us in stitches the entire trip. "Hellup me. I’ve lost my way. I need free beer." This was the new sentence that Toro was trying to teach his brother. The most fun part about them, however, was teaching English to TORO.

" 'Bugger's'" a good word to know," shouted Reg from the far reaches of the campsite.

"Or wicked," said Alison.

Hearing Toro repeat "buggah" and "wikkid" over and over again had all of us amused for ages.

"Where are you going next, Toro?" I asked.

"Ah, Sid-on-nee."

"Sydney?"

"Yes. Sid-on-nee for three days." The next ten minutes were a group effort to work on his pronunciation.

"Try ‘Adelaide,’" prompted Alison.

"I’d-a-laid."

Two British guys, Dan and Paul, were in hysterics. "Don’t say those words in that order to a girl," gasped Dan, laughing so hard that he could barely speak. He gestured to his lap: "Sid-on-nee. I’d-a-laid!" and soon the whole camp was howling.

Toro was so good-natured, he took all our laughter in with grace. I asked him what he and Atushi were going to do in Sydney, suggesting that they walk around the Harbor, from the Opera House to the Botanical Gardens.

"Is nice place to walk with girlfriend?"

"Oh definitely. It’s gorgeous." I paused. "You have a girlfriend?"

"No, but I look for one. I have three days," he nodded seriously. Once again, we were all reduced to tears. His candor and innocence were hopelessly funny. We started playing a numbers game, amused by our ability to count to 100. I can’t explain why the game had us entertained for so long. I caught Reg looking at us longingly, obviously jealous that we were having a cracking time while he boiled spaghetti. Next we switched to a name game, trying to learn and to memorize each other’s names. As you can imagine with our international backgrounds, everyone had their names butchered in countless funny ways.

The relaxed atmosphere gave me a chance to talk more to Katie and Kenny, a young couple from England. Katie and I shared stories about India – she had just spent two months teaching school children in a little village near Chennai. Dan and Paul, the two Brits, told Alison and I how they had spent two months in Thailand before they had gotten factory jobs in Sydney and worked there for eight months. They were nearing the end of their year abroad, flying out to Brisbane and going up the east coast in a few days. Robyn and Kevin told us how they had met each other the previous summer while working at the gaudy British holiday island of Majorca, off the Spanish coast. They were our resident washing-up couple. I’d never seen two men, gay or not, so eager to clean plates and silverware!

Over our spaghetti dinner, Alison and I chatted about earlier parts of her trip around Australia, talking mostly about Cairns and tropical Queensland. She was Cairns-sick, missing the friends she had made in that backpacker’s paradise. I drew fondly on my memories of Cairns from January 2001, telling her how depressed I had been when I had left the Great Barrier Reef and the nonstop party over there.

Then Reg came over and prepped us for the next day. "You can climb to the top of Uluru if you’d like. The Anangu people ask you not to, but the climb – just a chain up the side of the rock and very dangerous – is still open to the public because the Australian government makes too much money off of tourism to close it." He told us how 33 people in 20 years had died trying to climb the rock. Whenever someone died climbing the rock, the Anangu people felt a great deal of sadness, because these people were their guests. They hated seeing visitors die on their sacred land; they considered it their own loss. Reg explained how Uluru had originally been a meeting place, a place for reflection, a place to gather strength before moving on. It was only recently that the Anangu people had started educating tourists on the Tjukurpa behind their hesitance to let tourists scale the rock. Up until about five years ago, 80% of tourists climbed. Reg said that now the percentage was probably 20%. He admitted that over the course of nine years, he’d probably climbed the rock over 400 times.

"Have you ever asked the natives why they don’t like people climbing?" asked Valerie, a beautiful French girl.

"I have. I asked an elder, ‘What should I do? Should I be climbing the rock?’ He asked me where the majority of my tour groups were going – around the base or up the rock. I told him up the rock. Then he told me, ‘Then it is your place to be up there, too. Climb with them. You are the leader.’ He wanted me to be where my ‘people’ were. He wanted me to keep everyone safe. But now that I understand more about Tjukurpa, and because less people actually climb, I don’t anymore. The decision is up to you guys, though."

Then Reg began talking about some of his more personal experience with Aborigines. In the 1930s and 40s, thousands of Aboriginal children were taken from their families. They were raped, assaulted, thrown into foster homes, and also abandoned. Many parents never saw their children again. A few years ago, a very important elderly Aborignal woman who was dying of breast cancer wanted to make the journey to see her only son (who had been taken from her) before she died. Unfortunately, on her way to the community where her son was living, she passed away.

"I was out on tour that day with a group and the sky was clear, not a cloud in sight. Then these little white puffy clouds, like sheep all in a line, appeared. It was weird. Gradually, and I’m not lying here, those little white clouds grew larger and larger and darker and darker until the sky was black. It was the winter like now, when you usually don’t get rain for months. I’d never seen anything like it. It was the most spectacular and freak thunderstorm. The sky opened up and the lightning over Uluru was unbelievable. The land was sad. It was weeping for this woman, this elder, who had died with so much anger and loss. There’s no other way to explain the natural phenomena I’d just seen."

Our group was silent. The fire was spitting and popping but I shivered and stood up. Did I believe Reg? Did other people? A week before, no way. But after seeing Uluru and feeling the power of the Aboriginal land, I was rocked by Reg’s words.

"When you see Aborigines wandering around like vagrants in Alice Springs or other backpacker cities like Cairns, talk to them. Ask them what kind of life they’ve had. Ask them if they were taken from their parents when they were babies. I’ll bet you they’ll have some interesting things to say."

No one spoke for a long time. I walked over to my bag, took out my journal, and lost myself in a torrent of writing - sadness over their loss, fascination over the culture, guilt over my own ignorance.

"Are you ok?" asked Alison, peering at me with concern.

"Um, yeah. Fine. Just thinking about what Reg said." But I wasn’t fine. I gritted my teeth. I was angry. Frustrated. At home, I’m trapped in a rat-race. Working and chasing after my education, paving the way for my fantasy career, continually irritated by the money, politics and bureaucracy that medicine inevitably breeds. One of the reasons I had fallen in love with the Northern Territory was its simplicity. Its purity. It was depressing to hear how selfishness, greed and racism existed there, too. Maybe it was just a part of human nature. A fact of life. Maybe I just had to accept it and move on. I wrestled with these realizations.

"Well it’s gone really quiet around here. What happened to the Japanese songs?" Reg was sitting next to me.

I shrugged, "Don’t know, but I think your stories depressed us."

Reg pointed to my journal. "Venting?"

"Maybe."

"Travel journal?"

"Just a journal. Not particular to travel." I wanted to talk more to Reg about what I was thinking - hell, I wanted to stand up, yell into the chilly night and then go for a five-mile run – but I remained silent.

"You know, you need to see the documentary I have on the last two Aboriginals who left the Western Desert in 1972. It has real footage from their journey. Bit of a love story, but it’ll really put everything I’ve just told you into perspective."

I just nodded and looked away. I couldn’t say anything.

Alison and I finished our beers and the circle around the fire eventually broke up, people retiring to their tents and swags. The happy abandon of earlier was gone. That night I slept with two sleeping bags, a wool hat I’d borrowed from Reg, and two extra pairs of socks. It was still freezing.

~Hope