After our wonderful visit to the Desert Park at Alice Springs our coach driver took us on a short tour of Alice Springs (commonly abbreviated to “The Alice”). Alice Springs lies almost exactly in the centre of Australia, midway between Darwin and Adelaide. Surrounded by desert ranges and ancient landscapes, it began as a telegraph…
The Ghan travelled south through flat, uninspiring semi-desert as we enjoyed dinner and on through the night. The next morning we stopped at Alice Springs. Pete and I had been there just last year and visited the attractions in and around the town – Simpson’s Gap, Standley Chasm, and a quick lunch stop at the…
It was time to move on to Uluru. We checked out of the Crowne Plaza bright and early to board the buses for the long drive to the Rock. And it was raining! That’s a rare occurrence in this part of the world and although showers were inconvenient I wasn’t the only one hoping we…
We’d had a busy morning on our first day – Simpsons Gap, Standley Chasm, and the Desert Park. The afternoon was very different, with our visits in the town itself. Our first stop was at The Royal Flying Doctor Service. It has a small museum where visitors can read about the various pioneers of the…
The first day of our actual tour was very busy. Our group of fifty was divided into the reds and the yellows and each group set off in a bus big enough for everyone to have a window seat. Our driver, Roger, a knowledgeable Kiwi who’d been around the Red Centre for many years, was…
Alice Springs is often seen as simply a jumping-off point for tourists heading for Uluru and Kata Tjuta but there’s actually rather more to it than that. It was the site of the Telegraph station that connected Australia to the rest of the world via Darwin. The Ghan railway line has run from Adelaide to…
Quite a few months ago, before we decided to sell our house and move to a smaller property, Peter and I booked a short holiday to Alice Springs and Uluru. It had been many years – in the last century – since we’d been there and that had been with FILM cameras. Positively archaic. The…