What time is it there?!

..... usually referred to here as just "Alice", or sometimes even "The Alice". We stopped here partly because the flights were cheaper, but also because it's about the only other place to go in the centre of Australia! We'd always assumed that Alice Springs was quite close to Uluru, but the scale of Australian geography strikes yet again and it is actually a five and a half hour coach trip through nothing but stations. Not train stations but farms, averaging about 800,000 hectares each. How the devil you find your cattle on that amount of land is beyond me. As it is desert lands and not exactly the lush nourishment capital of the world, we wondered what the cattle actually eat .... in a word....anything!

We managed to pick a hotel right out on the edge of town which, although convenient for the casino!, meant that we had to get into town by taxi as the buses don't appear to run Sundays! Whilst it would have been possible to walk it, we didn't have a map and didn't really know how far we actually were out of the town centre and it was 40 degrees outside which isn't conducive to walking anywhere and consequently would have taken us all day and we only had one day here. We had 3 main objectives in this ridiculous heat, 1, climb Anzac hill (remembering it is 40 degrees outside), 2, visit School of the Air and 3, visit the Royal Flying Doctors Service. The hill wasn't as bad as it sounds as it is rather more a small mound rather than Ben Nevis but it did give us some good views of "The Alice" and this little spot of life in amongst millions of acres of bush. The tourist information centre also advised us that on weekends the School of the Air is pre recorded so there isn't really anything to see and there is no teacher for the tuned in students to interact with. This was a shame as it would have been really interesting to see how it all works and listen in on a class.

So we did a brief walking tour of the town centre and then headed for objective 3, the Royal Flying Doctor Service visitor centre........

The hub of the RFDS in Alice was also not operational on a Sunday as it is covered by another centre but they are still open for guided tours. After a brief video about the history and stuff, we headed to the main control room which is not much bigger than a single garage but is the lifeline for the people that live in an area larger than the UK. About 80% of Australia is covered by the RFDS and centres like the one in Alice and given the scale of this massive country, it is a big job. It is beyond words the incredible job that they do and left us all speechless after we had walked round and seen the museum. Whilst the Government do provide some money to the service, much of its ongoing survival is possible as a result of donations and fund raising. It was a real "...I want to leave all my money to the cats home..." moment but as we don't have that much spare, we added our bit of support by purchasing a few things from the 'very reasonably priced' gift shop. Had it not been for the constraints of our back packs, we may have ended up with much more but we definitely did our bit and felt the better for it.

All in all "The Alice" seems to be a bustling town full of really friendly people who seem to be extremely proud of where they live, the bus driver we had oozed passion for the town and the taxi driver was very keen to tell us the finer qualities of ALL the Aussie beers so that we have a list as long as your arm of what to try next.