What a rock-block.
Australian travel vloggers were shocked when they were slapped with a lengthy list of offenses after visiting the Aussie heritage site Uluru, as detailed in a viral Instagram post.
“There’s like 20 lines of fineable offenses,” Britt Cromie spluttered in the clip. She and her husband Tim — who post under the handle @lifeofthecromies — frequently document their travels to exotic locales for their thousands of followers on YouTube and Instagram.
However, the globetrotters got into trouble after chronicling a jaunt to Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, in Australia’s Northern Territory. At over 1,141 feet tall and 1.5 miles long — it is the largest sandstone monolith in the world.
According to the Uluru Website, photos of culturally sensitive sites are prohibited at Uluru — Kata Tjuta National Park out of respect for the Aboriginal Anangu people.
“The rock details and features at these sites are equivalent to sacred scripture for Aṉangu,” it reads. “They describe culturally important information and should only be viewed in their original location and by specific people.”
And while photos are allowed in other areas of the park, content creators and other media personalities must apply for a permit before doing so — a policy that the Cromies were unaware of at the time, News.com.au reported.
After finding out, the travelers had retroactively applied and purchased a permit, which reportedly costs $20 a day for commercial photography or $250 a day for filming, per the guidelines. They also removed all content featuring the aforementioned sensitive sites.
They thought they were in the clear until three months later, when the pair was hit with an email detailing the aforementioned offenses, many of which they found puzzling and unreasonable.
“It’s not actually based complete[ly] on sensitive areas,” Britt declared. “It’s things such as actions, like we picked up a broken branch we were using to swat flies and we’ve been told that we need to remove any footage of doing that.”
She added, “And some areas, even though they are photography zones, you need to include a wider area of the landscape.”
The guidelines urge visitors to obscure “sacred sites with an object such as a tree, bush, sand dune, person, or even a camel.” To make matters worse, the adventurers had been flagged for activity that breached the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Due to the abundance of accidental infractions, Britt said that she and her hubby would have to “remove their entire YouTube video” and a “chunk of our content off Instagram” as there was too much to edit out.
Luckily, despite the lengthy list of fineable offenses, the couple didn’t actually end up having to pay a penalty.
The content creator said she wasn’t trying to complain, but rather use their ordeal as a warning to other travel vloggers and documentarians traveling to Uluru about the dangers of shooting first and asking questions last.
“Do a s–tload of digging if you do want to film, photograph and share any of your content from Uluru,” Britt advised. “Just so you don’t end up with a massive email like this and potentially fined.”
The Cromies advised people in the video’s caption to “apply for a permit early, read the media guidelines carefully, and when in doubt, put the camera away.”
