A Whole New Territory

The taxi to the airport arrived at 0800, and I spent the journey chatting to the driver about his family who had been among the children sent here from the UK after the war. So many here have interesting stories to tell. At the airport I tried to check in by machine to be told that I had been allocated an exit seat – and had to check in by person. The queue was huge, so I asked and got shunted to the business class desk (sadly not a business class seat) and was through in 5 minutes. It’s strange starting a trip in a foreign airport and not being on the way home.

The plane journey was OK, until about 10 minutes before landing when the pilot came on the tannoy (interestingly that’s not a common word over here) to say that he apologised very much but the “office had just informed” him that the baggage machine had “broken down” at Adelaide and half the bags had been left behind. A quiet, anxious murmur ran round the plane. We flew over Uluru which looks like a red puddle from the air.

Thankfully my bag appeared (I had been envisaging a frantic afternoon shopping), probably due to the fact that I had missed the check in queue. There’s a shuttle bus from the airport into Alice Springs. There either seem to be backpacker’s hostels (8 to a room and the couple on the bunk below doing what they should be doing in private) or 5 star hotels. The place I was in was a hostel converted from a motel, so to get a private room ensuite I was right at the back. Still they were easy going and waived the night's payment until I got back from the tour.

I had a look round Alice in the afternoon, in the heat. It’s a small town that would be much smaller were the tourists not leaving from there to go to the desert. Most shops were closed, there were cafes open for food, and many Aborigines accosting you in the street to buy their paintings of very varied value ($2 about right for some). I would worry that I would buy one, turn it over and find “Made in China” printed there. Sadly several of the Aborigines were already passing-out drunk, contrasting with the tourists looking through their cameras.

Predictably, given the lack of things open, I went to the Botanical Gardens. It’s a patch of hard earth where a large selection of desert (it’s actually semi-arid) plants are collected, and a sacred hill in the middle which you can climb providing you keep to the path. Alice is strange attenuated place which is spread around several rocky foothills of the McDonnell Ranges, and with the wide Todd River running through the middle. You can tell it’s a river because there are trees growing along the course. Right along the middle of it. In the local creation-time stories (Tjukurpa), it is supposed to have been the gathering place of caterpillar, although if the hill in the Botanic Gdns is a caterpillar, the McDonnells are anacondas. Actually the gardens were really peaceful, even if the only shady place to lie is the top of a picnic bench.


When I got back to the room I turned on the TV – there are 2 channels. The local one (Imparja) is loosely based on Channel 9, and ABC. Thankfully the news was on and I managed to find out the Rugby score. Good effort. I thought the TV ads in Adelaide (all furniture stores and building materials) were strange, but in the NT they were for cow dip, horse auctions and “don’t go out in a boat without looking at the weather first!” Large country, small population.