Alice Springs

The pictures are actually from Kakadu National Park, now that we have the technology to put up photos again! We have pictures from Alice Springs, but as you’ll see from the blog, we did lots of museumy things, so the 3 pictures are from Kakadu up east of Darwin. You’ll see our “tent” which was very civilized, the Hartleys by an enormous termite mound and a not-terribly-good picture of a crocodile - I had described what happened in the Kakadu blog - this picture is a still one that John took after the croc had smashed the fish on the bank and managed to break off its head - he has the head in his jaws and the rest of the fish is on the bank. Just to show you how close we were and how large the croc was!
Day 1 in Alice Springs was Museum day. Our hotel is quite a way out of town, so we rented a car for a couple of days - probably a good idea to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road before we have to drive a campervan! So we managed to hit quite a few tourist high-spots.
We got to museum #1 by accident. It was the first Aboriginal art gallery we walked into and it turned out to be the most amazing place. We went in planning to just have a quick look around and ended up staying for about an hour, Aboriginal art varies by region - in Darwin there was lots of “x-ray” art which shows the internal organs of animals. In Alice Springs, there is more “modern” art - finger painting in lines which I don’t find so attractive but is still interesting. However, there was a huge variety of styles in the gallery, and there was a fascinating display of Aboriginal artifacts along with lots of information about their way of life. The owners of the gallery have collaborated with an Aboriginal group, giving them paints and canvas so that they can develop their art and earn some money.
Museum #2 was the Telegraph Station which was the beginning of the town of Alice Springs. We figured that all old telephone guys who visit Australia should go there! It was very interesting (and HOT!) - hard to imagine the lives of the families of the telegraph men who grew up completely isolated from the rest of the world.
Museum #3 was a transport museum - no prizes for guessing who was most interested! There were lots and lots of trucks - what more can I say?
Day 2 in Alice - we went to the Desert Park which was quite amazing. Three different desert habitats were laid out with a really good audio guide so you knew what you were looking at as you went around (note to brother John and sister-in-law Alison - the audio guides were EXCELLENT! There were little numbers posted to tell you exactly what to push and when - no need to scream “No WAIT before you push the green button!” - note to others: John, Alison and I went to Hampton Court near London and the audio guides were less than impressive!) There was a fantastic birds of prey display - owls, hawks and other raptors all free flying which had been trained to demonstrate how they catch their prey. It was really well done. There was also a really good nocturnal house which we went through with a guide and saw all kinds of creepy crawlies (John particularly liked the horny devil!) as well as mammals and snakes. And talking about mammals, there is a group of rock wallabies that live at our hotel. They come out in the evening and the hotel provides food pellets for guests to feed them. Of course the wallabies know that the food will be there and they put up with being photographed and petted. We participated in the photographing but not the petting or feeding! They really are cute little guys and you can get close enough to see the joeys in the pouches - sometimes a head sticks out but occasionally there’s just a really long leg which gets in the mom’s way - pretty cute!
We’ve been eating quite a variety of foods since we’ve been on the road. Nearly all the places we’ve stayed have provided us with the makings for tea (hurray!) and usually there’s a fridge, so we’ve been buying fruit, yogurt and pastries for breakfast. We have found that sharing something for lunch and supper gets us by quite well - servings are huge and eating out pretty expensive, so sharing works well. However, we are both feeling a little stout already as we’re not doing a whole lot of exercise. Our present hotel indicated that there would be a kitchenette, which turned out to be a microwave - so we’re looking forward to when we get our campervan and can have a bit more control over what we eat. We tried kangaroo the other night and agreed that it tasted a bit like liver (which luckily we both quite like). We also had wattle-berry ice cream - no idea what wattle berries are but damn, they taste good!
We leave Alice Springs on Thursday to go on a 4 day trip to Uluru (Ayers Rock) so probably no more blogging for a while. John has just invested in another piece of electronic wizardry which is supposed to allow us to be completely self-sufficient in the wireless internet department - we’ll see. We have had some less-than-wonderful experiences with internet services, so thought we should make our lives easier, but we will soon need an entire extra suitcase for all our electronics!