Say hola to Lobster Bob

A postcard from a rock that does not belong to the person looking at it.

La Mula, LAM-001-VE, carries Lobster Bob into the centre of Australia, to Uluru, the sandstone monolith rising 348 metres above the desert. It appears on the horizon forty kilometres out, a low shape, then a larger shape, then the only shape there is.

At the cultural centre, in thirty-eight degree heat, the woman at the visitor desk hands him a leaflet explaining what visitors do and do not do here. The climbing chain went up in 1964 and came down in 2019, after the Anangu had asked for thirty-five years.

Lobster Bob was never planning to climb. But he catches himself about to ask whether the rule applies to him, and he does not ask.

That is the failure, and the postcard. He walks the base instead, past waterholes and rock art, sits at Mutitjulu Waterhole for forty minutes, and watches the rock turn from brown to orange to deep red as the light drops.

You will learn who the Anangu people are and why the climb closed, why Uluru changes colour through the afternoon, and the fact to carry to school: the Pyramids of Giza are four and a half thousand years old, and people had been living at Uluru for tens of thousands of years before the first stone was laid.

Follow free wherever you listen, and grab your free Explorer Pack at lobsterbobspodcast.com - the Paper Passport and My Logbook page, ready to print.

Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.