Terry, I have a friend from Albuquerque who is currently on vacation in Australia. Today she sent me the following email. I would not have envisioned it as well as I did without your project, so thank you! It is as follows:
G'day Mates,
From the airport to Alice Springs town, the corrugated metal fences, dry river beds, ramshackle buildings and four wheel drive vehicles with snorkels (useful when driving through flooded areas) stood out. It was extremely hot outside and too chilly inside our air conditioned hotel. The receptionist said they had mozzies, flies and no seeums. I wondered why anyone would settle in such a bleak place, and yet something about it reminded me of Albuquerque.
The next morning Chuck convinced me to not spend the day in bed under the covers so we walked ten minutes in the intense heat from our hotel to Red Jack's sidewalk cafe. We waved off persistent flies as we ate a surprisingly good breakfast.
In the empty, small shopping mall nearby, there was a fake Christmas tree with Santa's kangaroos, including one with a red nose, pulling Santa's sleigh. Elvis was singing "It will be a blue Christmas without you."
The tourist information office had cancelled all walking tours due to the high temperatures. The fellow at the desk said we should take a taxi for a mile ride to the Araluen Cultural Arts Centre because it was so hot. We had the place practically to ourselves. Chuck looked at the old planes in the two-hanger Central Australian Aviation Museum. Nearby Araluen Art Galleries had an annual exhibit called Art Mob of dazzling symbolic artwork selected from Arboriginal Art centres throughout Central Australia. All paintings were for sale. My favorite was $10,000.
Next day we left before 6 a.m. on a bus tour to Uluru. Most of the five hour distance, we traveled on the Stuart Highway which runs 1,700 miles in a straight line from the top to the bottom of the country (Darwin to Adelaide). There are no speed limits on the highway north of Alice Springs so car companies use the highway to test drive their new models.
A short distance out of town, our tour guide Mattie called in our breakfast order before we lost telephone communication.
When we got to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, we stopped at a sunset viewing area to take pictures in case there was no sunset that evening. Uluru looks faded in this shot. We were the ones in danger of fading. It was 108 degrees in the shade. We drank water like crazy, and when we got off the bus for brief walks by Uluru, our guides Mattie and Andrew gave brief Aboriginal creation talks in the few shady spots along the path.
Such a gigantic sandstone rock formation looked different from every angle, and its colors changed with the sunlight.
A half hour drive away, we saw the Kata Tjuta conglomerate rock formations before we headed back to Uluru for sunset and an outdoor barbecue dinner.
It started raining at sunset. We moved our grill, folding stools and tables to the open side flaps of the bus to stay dry. Nobody seemed disappointed about the lack of sun. Our bus air conditioning system had stopped working so we appreciated the slight cooling with the change in weather. We watched lightening in the distance and noticed smoke from several lightening started fires.
Huddling around a long table, we chatted with others on our tour. A Dutch woman, married to an American/Mesopotamian, has been living in Brisbane for 14 years. She wishes the schools would teach Spanish because it is so useful worldwide. A couple from Berlin are in Australia for six months on work permits, hoping for jobs on the Sunshine Coast.
After we ate we settled in for the five hour drive back to Alice Springs, a town named for the first telegraph operator's wife who refused to stay there and for a water hole that dried up.
It was after 1 a.m. when we collapsed in bed. Next day we were bushed but full of stories our guides had told us on the adventurous bus excursion.
Workers used camels to haul supplies to construct the railroad to Alice Springs in the late 1800s. When it was completed, the government told them to shoot the camels. Having grown fond of those lovable creatures, the men released them into the wild instead. Today Australia has the largest wild dromedary camel population in the world, and they are exported to Afghanistan and Dubai.
We wandered out to The Royal Doctors Flying Service Visitor Center. The RDFS was started in Alice Springs in the 1920s and now has a fleet of 61 small airplanes serving the hinterlands as flying ambulances. A map at the center indicated which airfields are dirt, which are paved and which are lighted.
As we walked back to our hotel, I noticed the following statement on the side of a building:
The lone dingo symbolizes what so many of us are seeking when we head outdoors. Isolation, intimacy with the environment, a simple existence, a better understanding of ourselves, the motivation behind so many of life's journeys.
Maybe that helps explain the attraction to the heart of Australia.
The attendant for Virgin Australia who checked in our luggage is from Denver. She said we should return in the winter, a much better time to see the sights. I said there seemed to be more to Alice Springs than I first realized. She agreed.
As we took a taxi through crowded streets with pruned gardens to our next stop in Adelaide yesterday, I missed the colorful, wild spirited Alice Springs.
@cejaanderson Rhoda here. That was lovely Jane and sums up what we love about our outback. We are going back to Alice Springs next year for 6 weeks. So much more to see and do.
Thanks, Rhoda! I couldn't believe how quickly they were rushing through, and it didn't sound like they were camping out either. Your way is much better! If I had known she was planning this, I would have showed her Terry's project before she left.
@cejaanderson Hi Jane. Thank you for sharing that e-mail with us. It was wonderful. Its always interesting to see how someone from O/S with probably very little knowledge of parts/all of Oz see the place. I guess without 365, much of what she was talking about would have been completely lost on you.
They are having some unseasonally hot weather in central Oz at the moment but even so, Alice Springs in November is starting to push the boundaries a bit. She should definitely have tried to organise her trip there in the period May-Sept. And yes, the day trip to Uluru is a killer (400kms each way from memory) and does not give any appreciation at all of the place except to allow you to cross it off the bucket list.
As Rhoda mentioned above, we are heading back to the Alice for 6 weeks from late May to Early Jul next year. We are house sitting for some people who are off on a cruise. It's a long story how this came about but we are rapt.
Do you know if your friend is coming to Brisbane at all?
They've already been to Brisbane. Here is that report:
G'day Everyone,
There are no flights from the Whitsundays (and Airlie Beach) to Port Douglas. Instead we flew south to Brisbane on Saturday so we could fly north to Cairns for a shuttle bus to Port Douglas.
We enjoyed visiting Brisbane two years ago so we decided to stop en route to Port Douglas. This time we hoped to hear the organ at St. John's Cathedral and to visit Vanessa. We lucked out and arrived in town the weekend of a twilight organ concert. Dong Ill Shin, an internationally acclaimed organist from South Korea, did justice to the cathedral's magnificent organ with 4,500+ pipes. Concert highlights were Toccata and Fugue in F Major by Bach and Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns.
Jacaranda trees are plentiful in Brisbane, full of fragrant lavender blossoms.
Brisbane has diverse transportation systems. The bridge with posts sticking up like masts is a train bridge. Good walking and biking paths are on both sides of the river. We took a blue and white ferry like the one in this photo out to the University of Queensland where we met Vanessa.
Vanessa had just returned from a conference in Townsville, and next week she will be in Albuquerque. We were fortunate to catch up with her. She showed us the beautiful university campus and her office in the biology and environmental sciences building where she works as a post doctoral researcher. Vanessa has given us great travel suggestions. (ABQ Page Turners, Vanessa is Kathy Adams' wonderful daughter!)
The last evening of our extended layover in Brisbane we had a light meal. I ordered a lemon lime with bitters because it is a very Australian drink according to Vanessa.
Tomorrow night we plan to be relaxing in Port Douglas. We can send and receive e-mails, but the signal at our hotel will not be strong enough to send updates with photos. Similar situation may exist in Alice Springs, our stop after Port Douglas. We will send updates later, probably in a week or so from Adelaide.
Carol and Chuck
Correction: In the missive from Sydney I called an instrument aboriginals blow into a billabong. Wrong! It is a didgeridoo.
G'day Mates,
From the airport to Alice Springs town, the corrugated metal fences, dry river beds, ramshackle buildings and four wheel drive vehicles with snorkels (useful when driving through flooded areas) stood out. It was extremely hot outside and too chilly inside our air conditioned hotel. The receptionist said they had mozzies, flies and no seeums. I wondered why anyone would settle in such a bleak place, and yet something about it reminded me of Albuquerque.
The next morning Chuck convinced me to not spend the day in bed under the covers so we walked ten minutes in the intense heat from our hotel to Red Jack's sidewalk cafe. We waved off persistent flies as we ate a surprisingly good breakfast.
In the empty, small shopping mall nearby, there was a fake Christmas tree with Santa's kangaroos, including one with a red nose, pulling Santa's sleigh. Elvis was singing "It will be a blue Christmas without you."
The tourist information office had cancelled all walking tours due to the high temperatures. The fellow at the desk said we should take a taxi for a mile ride to the Araluen Cultural Arts Centre because it was so hot. We had the place practically to ourselves. Chuck looked at the old planes in the two-hanger Central Australian Aviation Museum. Nearby Araluen Art Galleries had an annual exhibit called Art Mob of dazzling symbolic artwork selected from Arboriginal Art centres throughout Central Australia. All paintings were for sale. My favorite was $10,000.
Next day we left before 6 a.m. on a bus tour to Uluru. Most of the five hour distance, we traveled on the Stuart Highway which runs 1,700 miles in a straight line from the top to the bottom of the country (Darwin to Adelaide). There are no speed limits on the highway north of Alice Springs so car companies use the highway to test drive their new models.
A short distance out of town, our tour guide Mattie called in our breakfast order before we lost telephone communication.
When we got to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, we stopped at a sunset viewing area to take pictures in case there was no sunset that evening. Uluru looks faded in this shot. We were the ones in danger of fading. It was 108 degrees in the shade. We drank water like crazy, and when we got off the bus for brief walks by Uluru, our guides Mattie and Andrew gave brief Aboriginal creation talks in the few shady spots along the path.
Such a gigantic sandstone rock formation looked different from every angle, and its colors changed with the sunlight.
A half hour drive away, we saw the Kata Tjuta conglomerate rock formations before we headed back to Uluru for sunset and an outdoor barbecue dinner.
It started raining at sunset. We moved our grill, folding stools and tables to the open side flaps of the bus to stay dry. Nobody seemed disappointed about the lack of sun. Our bus air conditioning system had stopped working so we appreciated the slight cooling with the change in weather. We watched lightening in the distance and noticed smoke from several lightening started fires.
Huddling around a long table, we chatted with others on our tour. A Dutch woman, married to an American/Mesopotamian, has been living in Brisbane for 14 years. She wishes the schools would teach Spanish because it is so useful worldwide. A couple from Berlin are in Australia for six months on work permits, hoping for jobs on the Sunshine Coast.
After we ate we settled in for the five hour drive back to Alice Springs, a town named for the first telegraph operator's wife who refused to stay there and for a water hole that dried up.
It was after 1 a.m. when we collapsed in bed. Next day we were bushed but full of stories our guides had told us on the adventurous bus excursion.
Workers used camels to haul supplies to construct the railroad to Alice Springs in the late 1800s. When it was completed, the government told them to shoot the camels. Having grown fond of those lovable creatures, the men released them into the wild instead. Today Australia has the largest wild dromedary camel population in the world, and they are exported to Afghanistan and Dubai.
We wandered out to The Royal Doctors Flying Service Visitor Center. The RDFS was started in Alice Springs in the 1920s and now has a fleet of 61 small airplanes serving the hinterlands as flying ambulances. A map at the center indicated which airfields are dirt, which are paved and which are lighted.
As we walked back to our hotel, I noticed the following statement on the side of a building:
The lone dingo symbolizes what so many of us are seeking when we head outdoors. Isolation, intimacy with the environment, a simple existence, a better understanding of ourselves, the motivation behind so many of life's journeys.
Maybe that helps explain the attraction to the heart of Australia.
The attendant for Virgin Australia who checked in our luggage is from Denver. She said we should return in the winter, a much better time to see the sights. I said there seemed to be more to Alice Springs than I first realized. She agreed.
As we took a taxi through crowded streets with pruned gardens to our next stop in Adelaide yesterday, I missed the colorful, wild spirited Alice Springs.
They are having some unseasonally hot weather in central Oz at the moment but even so, Alice Springs in November is starting to push the boundaries a bit. She should definitely have tried to organise her trip there in the period May-Sept. And yes, the day trip to Uluru is a killer (400kms each way from memory) and does not give any appreciation at all of the place except to allow you to cross it off the bucket list.
As Rhoda mentioned above, we are heading back to the Alice for 6 weeks from late May to Early Jul next year. We are house sitting for some people who are off on a cruise. It's a long story how this came about but we are rapt.
Do you know if your friend is coming to Brisbane at all?
G'day Everyone,
There are no flights from the Whitsundays (and Airlie Beach) to Port Douglas. Instead we flew south to Brisbane on Saturday so we could fly north to Cairns for a shuttle bus to Port Douglas.
We enjoyed visiting Brisbane two years ago so we decided to stop en route to Port Douglas. This time we hoped to hear the organ at St. John's Cathedral and to visit Vanessa. We lucked out and arrived in town the weekend of a twilight organ concert. Dong Ill Shin, an internationally acclaimed organist from South Korea, did justice to the cathedral's magnificent organ with 4,500+ pipes. Concert highlights were Toccata and Fugue in F Major by Bach and Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns.
Jacaranda trees are plentiful in Brisbane, full of fragrant lavender blossoms.
Brisbane has diverse transportation systems. The bridge with posts sticking up like masts is a train bridge. Good walking and biking paths are on both sides of the river. We took a blue and white ferry like the one in this photo out to the University of Queensland where we met Vanessa.
Vanessa had just returned from a conference in Townsville, and next week she will be in Albuquerque. We were fortunate to catch up with her. She showed us the beautiful university campus and her office in the biology and environmental sciences building where she works as a post doctoral researcher. Vanessa has given us great travel suggestions. (ABQ Page Turners, Vanessa is Kathy Adams' wonderful daughter!)
The last evening of our extended layover in Brisbane we had a light meal. I ordered a lemon lime with bitters because it is a very Australian drink according to Vanessa.
Tomorrow night we plan to be relaxing in Port Douglas. We can send and receive e-mails, but the signal at our hotel will not be strong enough to send updates with photos. Similar situation may exist in Alice Springs, our stop after Port Douglas. We will send updates later, probably in a week or so from Adelaide.
Carol and Chuck
Correction: In the missive from Sydney I called an instrument aboriginals blow into a billabong. Wrong! It is a didgeridoo.
I've been everywhere man
Cross the deserts bare man . . . . .
Ha Ha Talk about a whistle stop tour. The bridge is the Kurilpa pedestrian bridge which have featured at least once on 365 http://365project.org/terryliv/365/2014-09-14