Wonder why I landed in Alice……………..

You see a lot of this

“Alice Springs”,” The Alice”, or just plain “Alice”; say any of those to an Aussie and they will know that you’re heading to the outback……….way outback!  Alice Springs is about 900 miles from Adelaide, smack dab in the middle of Australia, surrounded by absolutely nothing. Riding “The Ghan” , the venerated train named after the Afghan camel riders who helped build the railroad north and South across Australia, was something special.  It’s changed a bit since I first dreamed of my journey to the” Red Centre”, as the area around Alice is known. The train no longer runs on the narrow gauge track it once did, although in one spot you can see some of the old track, but the view out the window certainly hasn’t changed; mile upon mile of desert (well technically not a desert but an arid zone), as far as the eye can see, covered with salt bush, spinifex grass and a dozen other desert (arid zone just doesn’t sound as nice) plants I can’t name. I only learned of those two from folks on the train. Surprisingly, as I saw from the “The Ghan” and would observe later as I travelled around the  area, the desert was very green; a sort of gray green, but green none the less, not the rusty dusty reddish brown I had expected. I learned later that the area has had above average, almost record, rainfall for the past 18 months and everything was in bloom.  Since it was a 24 hour train ride from Adelaide to Alice I opted for a single berth instead of a red service seat. As you would expect on a train the room is a compact space, barely 6 feet by 4 feet, with everything, the table, the bed, the sink neatly folding away. When the bed is in the down position you can barely open the door, but it was a comfortable getaway to watch the miles and miles and miles Australian landscape roll by. The train is a throwback to an earlier day when the pace of travel was slower and maybe a little more civilized. Sure I could have flown to Alice in a couple hours, but I’m on an odyssey not a vacation; experience more valuable than time. The car has an undulating hallway hardly shoulder width wide to utilize the space more efficiently. I’m positive trying to pass someone in the hall is not always possible; one time I met a fellow in the middle who literally had to suck in his ample mid-section in order for us to pass. Meals are served in the dining car where you are assigned an early or late service and since the train was full to capacity you

couldn't just sit wherever you wanted. People travelling together were seated together and then the crew filled in the remaining seats with the lone travelers. For dinner I was seated with two blokes and a Sheila from Australia. They were all taking The Ghan through to Darwin. The gal was a nurse on holiday, one gent a vintner on his way to see his son coming in from Singapore, and Tom, an older man, was on a holiday trying to escape for a moment from the pains of his daily life. His family and friends mandated that he take a break, for his wife has Alzheimer’s and he has been dealing with the cruelty of that insidious disease that many of us know from personal experience. He looked tired, resigned and sad. The vintner recounted tales of seeing Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and Ella Fitzgerald in Vegas back in the 50’s. As I was staring out the window, the sheila said look at all the paddy melons , so I’m looking for the little wallabies I saw in Tasmania, but didn’t see any. The she made a comment about them being yellow and I was totally confused. She was referring to a watermelon-like fruit that grows everywhere in the outback, not the cute pademelons (little wallabies) from Tassie, although both were pronounced the same. The paddy melon is a weed and the fruit is not edible which is a shame because there are a lot of them around. At other meals I met a guy from Oklahoma who now lives in Belgium and works for NATO; a retired couple, cattle farmers from the bush in New South Wales; and the bartender, a gal in her early twenties who has travelled a lot of the world, dove the Great Barrier Reef and has just bought a house.  Houses are expensive in Australia and listening to people talk the situation sounds mighty similar to the state the US was in before the bubble burst. On the way back from dinner I turned the corner of one sleeping car to find an elderly women getting ready for bed, standing half way in the hall and half in her berth, not wearing any pants. It took the two of us by surprise. We both had a laugh and I kept moving on hoping I could get the inage out of my head before I fell asleep. You won’t see that on a plane!

Iron Man Monument

There was not a kangaroo in site all the way to Alice Springs. I saw a lot of cows, and some dead cows, but not a single roo. We passed the “Iron Man Monument”,  the site of the one millionth concrete sleeper starting from Adelaide,  and the dry Finke River before finally arriving in Alice Springs.

Alice is not a wonderland, not the rough and tumble, outlaw, wild-west locale I had envisioned back in the 70’s…….. and it doesn’t even have a spring.  The “spring” is actually a low point in the usually

The Spring



Todd River - This depth guage is not a joke

dry Todd river, where some solid rock underlies the sandy river bed keeping the water from seeping down through.  The Todd river, like the Charles, Finke and other rivers in the area are dry rivers. Most time they are bone dry and only fill for short periods of time when heavy rains fall. The rest of the time the river runs underground supporting the river gums and other vegetation along its banks. Every year the town of Alice holds the Todd river boat race. The boats are like Fred  Flinstone’s car with your feet sticking out the bottom of the boat; you hold up the boat and then run down the sandy river. The race has been cancelled three times because of water in the river!

There’s not much to see or do in Alice Springs; it’s really a jumping off point for other nearby sites like Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (The Olgas), King’s Canyon and others; and when I say nearby I

mean that in Australian terms, Uluru is about 450 Km from Alice, the Olgas even farther. I took a walk along the Todd River (I could have just as easily walked in the Todd river) to the Telegraph Station just outside of town, about 6km from where I was staying.  The history of the area is fascinating to me.  The station was the midpoint of the Overland Telegraph Line between Adelaide and Darwin.  When the line was opened in the 1870’s it reduced the time it took sending messages from months to hours.  It must have been a lonely, isolated place to live. I took a hike along one of the trails and then walked up ANZAC hill, the highest point in town, to get an overview

Alice from ANZAC hill

of Alice. The hill was on fire the Saturday before I arrived; timing is everything. In the afternoon I stopped in for a digeridoo workshop; there were two if us. Yes, digeridoo is a real word, not one made up to win a trivia game. The word is the name given by Europeans to a musical instrument played by the Aborigines. Later that evening when I went to see the digeridoo show (I told you there wasn’t much to do in Alice), little did I know there was an audience participation part. The show was contemporary dige not traditional and was actually quite entertaining with modern tempos, mood lighting and video. They asked for a volunteer to come up and play the digeridoo and of course no one, including myself, wanted to get on stage. Having attended the workshop I was recognized by the impresario and asked to join the band.  Having heard me play he knew that I can make a decent sound, but I need to learn the art of circular breathing (breathing in while blowing out) so I can make a continuous sounds instead of sound between breaths. People were surprised by my ability, but thankfully other members of the audience were asked to come up and play rhythm with sticks, shakers and bongos so the focus wasn’t totally on me. It was all good fun and gave me a better appreciation for how skillful the dude was with the instrument.

Found my pants

Second Hand Store

The next day I rented a bicycle and drove out to Alice Springs Desert Park about 25km away. Riding along, away from the center of town, it looked a suburb of Phoenix Arizona.  The park was very informative about the plant life of the area, but you could see most of the flora in the park for free just by driving around the area for a few hours. Still I enjoyed my time there except for the fact that I left my pants there. Okay not my whole pants, just the bottom half of the pants leg. It’s  cold in the morning, so I start off with long pants. As the day progresses and it gets warm, you can zip off the pant leg just above the knee and make shorts; it’s a really nice feature. I zipped them, folded them and forgot to put them in my backpack. I didn’t realize it until I got back to the hotel and returned the bike.  Since the bike rental was closed and a taxi was going to cost $40 round trip I thought the legs were lost. Thankful the desk clerk asked me why I needed to go to the park so late since they were closing. I explained the unique situation and after she stopped giggling she came to the rescue by calling a tour bus that was picking up some people at the park and asked if they could pick up my pants legs as well. Disaster averted and an amusing anecdote for the hotel desk clerk.

Tomorrow 5:45am begins my “WayDownUnder” Tour of the Red Centre…………

Crikey!

norb