The Journey Continues
Trip Start
Dec 18, 2008
1
3
12
Trip End
Jan 09, 2009
Where I stayed
Alice Springs, Northwest Territories, Australia
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Okay, so we made it to Alice Springs yesterday morning. Our 5th flight in 6 days. I gotta say, upon first look, as far as I am, concerned we coulda skipped this town. It is serious outback desert - hot and dry. There is very little here other than chachke stores...and seeing as our only free day here, tomorrow, is Christmas day (and all the shops will be closed) I rather wish we had spent more time in melbourne and Adelaide and skipped Alice Springs.
The common thread in Australia seems to be the flies. They are in every city and town. Big ones, little ones, very aggressive and they dive bomb right for your eyes and your mouth. And they are getting more persistent as we move into the outback.
Alice Springs is the first place we have seen aboriginal people - but they are not a happy lot. They are still very much second class citizens. It reminds me a lot of native American reservation situations. Lots of drinking and drugs and little work and highly dysfunctional families, no government support and yet the government will not let them run their own businesses. Not a good scenario. Kids who don't want to be at home with their drunk possibly abusive parents evidently roam the streets at all hours of the night getting into trouble. This place definitely has a depressed air to it.
The immediate town is run down and cheesy. The surrounding landscape is mountainous and dried out brush typically. But it is actually somewhat green now which is highly unusual. They just had the wettest November on record for many years so we are the lucky beneficiaries and we see grasses and green trees and even some water in dried out riverbeds ... The first water there in 28 years. The change in scenery versus the coastal cities is quite remarkable. But, Australia is about the same size as America and we are covering a lot of ground. It is not surprising to see such varying landscapes.
Yesterday we toured the Alice Springs School of the Airwaves...a distance learning program spanning 1.5 million square kilometers. Kids (whites only, no aboriginals) in distant and remote locations are provided with satellite dishes and computers and the kids dial in to daily online classes where they see their teacher on their computer and participate in a sort of group webcast for their classes. Amazing program. Each child has a home tutor (parent or hired tutor) and each class is no more than 14 kids. So they actually get a lot of personal attention even if it is via their computer.
Then we visited the Royal Flying Doctor service. Another amazing outback innovation. State of the art planes which are actually flying hospitals staffed with a nurse and doctor fly all across the outback and remnote regions servicing the medical needs of Australians everywhere. They also transport patients between remote medical centers and major hospitals in other cities, fly organ donors between locations, you name it. They are truly amazing. And, they are the folks who will take care of us tourists traveling through the outback, should we need any medical attention.
Then it was off to the telegraph station... a look at the original outpost that was the birth of Alice Springs. It started as a repeater station for the telegraph line being created from the northern tip to the southern tip of Australia. Our guide was Alec, a 74 year old aboriginal man who was taken from his mom at 2 years old as part of the "stolen generation" and raised partially on the telegraph outpost and then in a methodist mission school. He was fascinating and entertaining and showed us all how to properly throw a boomerang (yes they really do come back to you) which I failed at miserably.
Then our whole group had dinner together at a local restaurant where we were served crocodile, kangaroo and emu. The croc was good, the kangaroo a bit gamey and I didn't have the emu.
Our hotel here is pretty downscale, and filled with blue-collar families on their christmas holiday. But it does have a welcome pool. So, we lit our menorah out by the pool and enjoyed the first break in the heat at about 9 pm last night.
Today a few of us rose at 4:45 am and took a two hour sunrise hike along the dry riverbed with our Overseas Adventure guide, Wayne (during the trip we came to call these impromptu walking tours "Wayne's Walks"). It was really gorgeous. We ran into Wallabies and Kangaroos and all manner of bird and insect. Thank god we brought along those fly nets to protect our faces. But the mountains and sacred aboriginal sites are awesome. And the sunrise was beautiful.
Then we met the rest of the group for today's outback cultural tour. Our guide was Lyndsey, a local aborigine who took us to many aboriginalsacred grounds and explained the history of the local tribes, the significance of the sacred places, told us of their various initiation rites, and we even waded across the remnants of the river left over from the November rains to see the ancient wall paintings on the rocks above the riverbed.
It was fascinating. Then Lyndesy took us to a local aborigine community (think indian reservation) which was really depressing. But we got to see some local paintings and art...I purchased a painting that Lyndsey painted which I fell in love with. It is an aboriginal symbol of four men around a campfire planning their next day's hunt and visualizing all the animals they will successfully find the next day...I just loved that it is all about visualizing your success...plus the painting is beautiful.
Now we are spending the rest of what is Christmas day here lounging by the pool. Tonight we are making a big BBQ and enjoying a relaxing night before heading out to Uluru (Ayers Rock) tomorrow. Yes, we are cooking shrimp (and steak) on the Barbie - and evidently that turns out to be a very traditional Christmas BBQ here.
The next few days will be pretty jam packed, but I'll try to keep up the emails.
Love to all of you,
