We made it!  A Two hour flight from Adelaide put us in a landscape light years from our imaginations.  When I thought about the Outback, pictures of a barren red desert came to mind. Alice Springs was a one dirt road town lined with bars and rowdy cowboys.  Yup!  All wrong.

Alice, as the locals call it, is a thriving community of about 30,000 in a *desert* with underground rivers, many species of trees and grasses, and with mountains, buttes, and rock formations all around.

The stunning red, rocky hills are somewhat reminiscent of the deserts in the southwest and aside from snakes and other weird critters appealed to me very much.  That’s a riverbed in the front of this picture!

In the 1800’s when “free” Aussies began moving outside the southern states to explore and build a telegraph to connect all of Australia with itself and England, one fellow decided Alice Springs would be a good  place because there was a river there. Little did he know it had recently rained and runoff was in the riverbed, just where you’d think it should be.  But, here the water sinks into the ground and has made a river underneath the topsoil.  Weird, right?  Well, the guy decided to stay and built a complex here and he invented a way of stringing the wire the singing words used to transmit Morse Code around ‘Stralya’ and to England cutting communication time from six to ten months to four hours!

The dark side is this post was also used as a re-education camp for aboriginal children.  They were taken from their homes and put in dormitories and taught white man’s ways, of course to the detriment of all.  When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

Yes, when will we ever learn?  This monument is to the ANZAC’s who have fought and died in wars right up to the current one in Afghanistan. The chorus once more, please.

This night we were in for a special treat!  Out to a nearby cattle station we went and learned to throw boomerangs!  Be afraid!  We also sat around a campfire and ate steak, potatoes, salad,  bread, and dough pie (sort of like a big biscuit made in a Dutch oven over the coals and served with treacle.  Yum!). Then we stargazed and we’re amazed at the galaxies before us!  I used to sit on my Dad’s lap and count stars.  This took me back to those days of yore.

Next up was another wildlife park featuring desert animals.  There was a bird show with a desert eagle, a barn owl, a kite, a quoll (in red light because he’s nocturnal.  Has black fur with white dots.), another dingo, a Thorney Devil, and an Emu pronounced e-myou.

We stopped by The Purple House which is a sort of Day Treatment center for aborigines needing dialysis. They can only do two treatments a day because the house is in a neighborhood and the neighbors don’t like it.  So, they have an outreach van which can come to where the need is greatest.  The aboriginal diet has been changed so much they have an 80% diabetic rate.  I hear a chorus coming on!  But at least a few people care.

And, speaking of caring, back in the early 1900’s a woman decided that there were a lot of children in the Outback too far from schools to be able to get an education.  She figured out a way of getting school materials to these kids and having circuit riding teachers and by using the telegraph, later two way radios, and then computers, to give a good education to the far flung kids out in the bush.  This is called The School of the Air, or as I heard it when our guide told us where we were going, The School of th Ear.  That one took a while!

And, so, with the sun setting over Alice Springs we get ready for the five hour bus ride tomorrow to Uluru!