The drive from Kings Canyon to Alice Springs took about 5 hours, plus 30 minutes extra for leaving Kings Canyon on the wrong highway, which dead ends about 1/100th of the way to Alice Springs, and won't be completed for a few more years, plus stopping for gas and taking the time necessary to get over the $150 it took to fill up the tank, plus stopping for lunch, so 6.5 hours.
So by the time we got to Alice Springs and refreshed, we only had time to walk around the town and see what an old outback town felt like. Well, I can tell you, it doesn't feel anything like a small town in the outback, with a McDonald's, Target, shopping mall, hospital, golf course, etc. About the only way I knew I was in the outback and not Ft. Morgan, Colorado, were the large numbers of Aboriginal people walking around.
For supper we got some veggies at Woolworth's, which may or may not be related to Woolworth's in America, but here it is a grocery store, and then went to Bojangles, a famous old-style outback pub. The walls are covered with items from the history of the outback and the Northern Territory. Misa pointed out that if it wasn't a pub they could call it a museum. We met our new friends there, the woman from Slovakia and the Kiwi that we first met in Uluru and had run into every day since. We had a great time, the food was good and we had a lot to talk about.
Today we went to see the city sights, starting at the ANZAC Hill overlooking the town, then the Royal Flying Doctor Service museum. Due to the extremely large area between the coasts where almost no one lives, there are tens of thousands of people without access to medical care. So in 1928 they started the Royal Flying Doctor Service, with bases all over Australia, to fly nurses and doctors to where they are needed and to fly patients to hospitals when necessary. It is a huge operation, with 23 bases, 68 aircraft, and over 500 employees. From Alice Springs they can cover anywhere in a 350 mile radius within 3 hours of getting a call. What surprised me the most was that each airplane costs $6 million, is replaced every 10 years, and are purchased with donations.
After that we went to the old telegraph station. Originally Alice Springs was a relay station for the telegraph from Adelaide to Darwin. There had to be a relay station every 200 miles where the morse code was retransmitted, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The retransmission consisted of a guy sitting at a desk, listening to the morse code come in from the previous telegraph station, and simultaneously tapping it out and sending it down the line to the next station. The completion of the telegraph line allowed messages from Australia to go to England and the response sent back all within two days. Previously letters were sent by ships and the round trip was 6 months. By coincidence it is Heritage Week here this week, so they had a couple of old guys that actually used to work in the telegraph offices in Australia showing us how it worked. In Australia they were using morse code to send telegrams until the late 60's. This week they have someone at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney manning the station at the other end, and are sending telegrams back and forth between Alice Springs and Sydney. Misa had a little lesson on morse code and telegraphs and got a certificate. Katka surprised us all by remembering that she learned morse code in scouts and surprised us even more by remembering the code for a lot of the letters.
We ate lunch in town before heading out to the Alice Springs Desert Park. It is a large educational area with native plants and animals on display in a huge 3,000 acre park. We had a nice animal lecture by one of the park rangers and walked through a good portion of the park to see the native desert plants. The highlight, of course, was the nocturnal house, where we got to see active native desert animals that thought it was night because they switch on the lights at night and off during the day. I guess we find the animals in Australia extra cute because they are unusual to us, but it is hard to see a little furry creature with big eyes and big ears and not want to take it home.
For supper we went to a pizza place next to our hotel and then homeschool and reading. One downside of all the reading we have had Misa do during her life is that she reads very fast and all the time. With books here costing $20 each it is painful when she finishes one in two days.
