Australia Day 4 - Outback – Alice Springs

This morning, we departed Melbourne Airport, on our way to central Australia, otherwise known as “The Outback” It was a 2 hour flight, but due to the time changes, I rolled back my watch 1.5 hours, so we landed only 0.5 hour after takeoff. One thing I need to watch, my primary luggage bag weight is now 31 Kilos, and the maximum bag weight is 32 kilos (whew). I think that I’m going to need to dump some of those hotel soaps and shampoo tubes I’ve been “acquiring”
:-)

Alice Springs itself is quite a bit more modern then I expected. With a population of ~25K, they have a large mall, and even a K-Mart! There is quite a large Aboriginal population, and one thing that I couldn’t help noticing, is that hair dyeing appears to be quite popular among the local people. The aboriginal people are quite dark skinned, and it was shocking to me at first to see blonde haired Aboriginals! I thought maybe it was some sort of genetic thing at first, but you know how it’s difficult to achieve natural looking red hair color with dye? It’s a dead give away on the Aboriginal people too :-)

We had a little free time to wander around the town of Alice Springs, and they have all the usual stuff you would expect, like a McDonalds and a KFC Chicken place. One interesting thing, is that they have Burger King here, but it’s called Hungry Jack’s. The restaurant colors and corporate symbols are identical, so I know it’s the same burger place. The story goes, is that before Burger King came to Australia, someone registered that name, hoping to squeeze BK for lots of money when they got here. In the USA, that’s called extortion, and Since BK refused to pay ransom for the name, they simply changed the name, and the person who registered it, ended up with nothing. Good.

Anyway, the tour today, was visits to the Alice Springs Historic Telegraph Station, which use to provide telegraph communications signal boosting from the mainland, that was very interesting, and also to the Royal Flying Doctors Station, which provides doctors and medical treatment to fly to remote areas of the Outback that don’t have Hospitals, as well as the “School Of The Air”, which provides Streamed Satellite Classroom Education instruction for children of people in remote areas. They have live interactive classroom education, where the remote students CAN Log in and have 2 way communication with the Teachers. Pretty Cool, huh? We also visited Anzac Hill, which provided panoramic views of the area.

That night, I attended a show of Aboriginal Dancing, and dinner, which if it were Hawaii, would be similar to a Luau. There was a huge 3 course dinner and during the show, they asked for male volunteers to demonstrate their “ability” at making music on the traditional horn called a didgeridoo. Guess who was one of the people who went up on stage (hehehe). You know me, I’m not shy, and after a short demonstration of how to do it, the 3 of us each took turns. It was hilarious, since we were amateurs, we sort of sounded like sick elephants :-) When they asked the audience to clap for each “performer”, I’m pretty sure I got the biggest applause, and no, it had noting to do with the dozen or so other people present at the show from my tour group. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it
:-)

Tomorrow, off to Ayers Rock (Uluru).