Heavitree Gap Outback Lodge Alice Springs

Returning to Earth from the surface of the moon at Henbury, we crash landed in Alice Springs, where we timed our visit to take in the Henley-on-Todd Regatta, famous the world over.

Alec writes:
We watched a boat race. It wasn't an ordinary boat race which you sailed. It was a race where you had to make big boats that you put your feet underneath, and then you ran along the riverbed. The only time they cancelled the race [in previous years] was when there was water in the river.
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After spending the last 4-5 days traveling along the Stuart Highway we have reached the big metropolis of Alice Springs.
The last few days we have stayed in the 'free camps' which are always full of other travelers intent on saving a few dollars during their travels.
We like these free camps because our 5th wheeler has all the mod cons i.e., shower, toilet, plenty of water and recently our newly acquired satellite dish for the TV.
We arrived in Alice around midday, and by the time we...

The famous train 'The Ghan' needs two days (which means one night) to get all the way down from Adelaide, South Australia, up to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory (aka the 'Heart of Australia'). For this trip I allowed myself a little bit of luxury and so I went with the gold category which is kind of first class and I had a cabin on my own (with bed of course). It's really interesting to see the landscape change and they also provide a lot of historic information on the train. What I d...

After the Outback tour I stayed for another day at Alice Springs before going on with my flying to Cairns. Until now I didn't have time to see this place itself. Where everything began with a telegraph station next to a water hole what they believed to be a spring, but it wasn't. It was only some water in the usually very dry Todd river. Like in Sydney I took a hop-on-hop-off explorer bus which brought me to several interesting destinations. And on the way I got to see my first kangaroo! Besi...

So there i am, waiting next to the road at 5.45 in the morning, in the darkness of the outback, the day after flying into Alice springs... wait, so how did i get here??? Well let me explain. I was supposed to have been collected for my 2 day adventure tour from my "in the middle of nowhere" accommodation an hour ago. This obviously hadn't happened and so i was contemplating saving myself from the freezing cold and retreating to the warmth of my heated dorm room. But I decided to stick it out ...

As some of you will know we had not planned on going to Ayres Rock however as the time has gone on I've had the feeling that Loz really wanted to go as he kept working out timings and we just didn't quite have enough time from Cairns however as everything seems to be closed in the Northern Territory we're doing quite well on time so we've decided to bite the bullet and just go for it. So this is the reason that we got up at 5.45am this morning to travel 1200k down to Alice Springs in one day....

Hello from the Red Centre,

Finally we have made it to the centre of Oz. It is very red and the air is very dry, we are all suffering from cracked lips and giving each other electric shocks, youch! Surprisingly enough there are more trees and shrubbery than we expected, a lot of the natives are in flower and make a spectacular display. There is a lot to see in and around 'The Alice', so we decided to stay for a week to give ourselves a good chance at seeing some of it.

Our first ...

Today was the 48th Henley-On-Todd Dry River Bed Boat Races- yep, various boat races held on a dry river bed, with no water in sight!
It was a great day and we certainly saw some whackiness! Events included Bring-Your-Own boat (where members of the public designed and built their own boats to race), Single-man Kayaking, 8-man Sail Boats and then finally the Battle of the Boats (which ended the day in big bang flour & water madness!).

Not quite sure as yet what the Variety Bash is but it seems to involve about 200 themed cars driving a certain distance together in the aid of charity. If I find out more info I'll update this page but for now I'll just include a few photos of these amazing classic cars.

for several days, we mooched around the lovely outback city of alice springs, waited for our campervan to get fixed, and fed the caravan park's resident rock wallabies!