The Wanderings of busman7

The Ghan is just The Indian Pacific with a different name that travels North & South instead of East & West they are identical in equipment & service with the only problem being only one non-sleeper car on each train with sleepers being ridicously expensive. No seats on The Ghan tomorrow so have to take the Grey Dog to Darwin.

Uluru is this big red rock out in the desert 470+ km from Alice & I really can’t see what all the fuss is about, the only saving grace of the trip was the salad & cold cut lunch served with wine in the bus parking lot at sunset.

That said the sunrise balloon trip at Alice Springs was awesome!! Followed, of course, by the obligatory Champaign toast at the landing spot in the Outback

Can add Kangaroo, Camel, Emu & Crocodile to the list of different foods I have tried.

Alice Springs is not only an expensive tourist town but also the hub of much of the Northern Territory & the Outback so once you get past the tourist thing you have a down to earth town where I could live if I were 20 yrs younger & could put up with the crazy prices (did I mention that I got spoiled by the cheap cost of living in Bangkok).

Alice is also home to the Flying Doctor service & The School of the Air which serves 133 students living in an area of over 1,000,000 sq kms. Shall check out the Transportation museum showing the advent of the road train also the Kenworth section then across the road to the museum of the original Ghan railroad, flew over a portion of the original narrow gauge track in the balloon yesterday.

At 19:00 it’ll be bye bye to the Alice as the “Dog” heads north to Darwin.

Trivia; Alice Springs is only 125 km NW of the geographic centre of Australia, It’s roughly 1500 km to both Adelaide & Darwin. Kangaroos & camels are both considered pests.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 15:37 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.