Play me didgeridoo, mate
Wednesday, Oct. 5
Today is a travel
day, but we have to be up and at ‘em early in the morning, again.
This seems to be a theme. What I like is when the schedule tells us
the restaurant opens at 6, and we can have breakfast "at leisure,
but we're leaving at 7. Fortunately breakfasts are full English
breakfasts, basically a buffet with the usual morning pluss stuff we'd never eat for
breakfast at home, like baked beans and vegetable sticks, so we don't have to wait to eat (unless you
order an omelet.)
We will check in at
the airport as a group, a concept that seems to be as foreign to most
of the group as it is to us. I feel sorry for Tony, though – put
40-odd seniors in a group and suddenly you're dealing with a bunch of
kindergartners who don't seem to be able to read or follow
instructions.
Domestic flights
don’t have as many restrictions as international flights, but they
still do the random checks for drugs and explosives. Sharon and
Brandon are tapped. (Sharon will be picked again before we leave the
country and asks, “OK, what do they think old ladies are going to
do?”)
We arrive in Alice
Springs, part of the Australian Outback, at about 11 in the morning.
This part of the country is in the Australian Central Time Zone,
which is only a half hour different from the eastern zone, except
they don’t follow DST, so it’s an hour and a half off Melbourne
time. The whole time zone thing will be confusing. Cairns is in the
eastern zone, but not on DST; Sydney’s fully a part of the Eastern
zone with DST. Given that we’re only in country for two weeks, and
that we’re skipping a huge part of the country, we undergo way too
many time changes. Good thing you can get the time from your cell
phone – especially given that the clocks in our rooms are never
right, and most of the time I can't figure out how to change them.
Speaking of cell
phones, Brandon’s cell phone works in Australia, but Aaron’s and
mine don’t. We bought new SIMs at the Vodaphone store so we could
keep up with each other if we got separated. Thirty bucks for
unlimited talk and text and two gigs of data for a month. Given the
exchange rate, that ain’t bad. Aaron thinks we're getting ripped off at home.
 |
| ANZAC Hill |
We won’t go
straight to the hotel after our arrival. Instead we’ll take a brief
tour of the town, starting with the war memorial, which is built on
ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Hill, maybe the tallest
vantage point in the town. From the hill you can see pretty much the
entire town and the McDonnell mountain ranges that lie nearby.
Interesting thing
about Alice Springs is that the town was not built on or near a
springs. The earliest settlers arrived after the rains and mistakenly
thought the water was a result of a spring. A large river bed runs
through the town, so dry while we’re there that the only way to
know with certainty that it’s a river is by the sign on the bridge
near our hotel.
 |
| Mural at School of the Air. |
After hearing a bit
about the history of the area and taking a good 360 view of the town
we head for The School of the Air. If you take a look at a map of
Australia, you’ll see that a large chunk of the country is arid to
semi-arid, with small towns scattered about. Educating the children
who live in this vast area – most of them living on cattle stations
that would make Texas ranchers jealous – with few roads and fewer
schools was a challenge. The School of the Air, now just one of
several scattered throughout Australia and New Zealand, aimed to
solve that problem.
Another service, the
Royal Flying Doctor Service, which we will also visit, had
established a radio network throughout the Outback that used radios
powered by attached pedal-powered generators. This network became the
basis for The School of the Air, allowing students to have real-time
contact with teachers, though sometimes the reception was spotty.
Students were mailed lessons and texts to complete them with, and
they mailed the completed material back. Over time the school has
adopted new technologies – television, computers, Internet, for
example -- and the school sponsors regular get togethers so the
students have opportunity to interact with one another.
The presentation
here is scheduled to take a lot longer than is necessary to explain
the operation, so we cover the same ground – how many students they
have, how many thousands upon thousands of acres covered -- more than
once.
 |
| The pedal power radio that started it all, or one like it |
We move on from
there to the Royal Doctor Flying Service headquarters. The RDFS, as
you might guess from its title, flies doctors and nurses to remote
areas of the country to provide medical services – from clinics
that address basic health needs to emergency situations – to the
underserved areas of the country. We view a holographic presentation
detailing the history of the RDFS and its services, much more
interesting than the presentation at School of the Air, and wander
through a small museum before heading for the hotel.
After we check in,
Sharon asks if we can go to the McDonald's to see if we can buy a
soda with ice. Google Maps shows the Macca’s to be a short walk
away, so we head off. Only problem is that I’ve never used Maps to
go somewhere on foot, so I’m not sure we’re on the right route.
We come to an intersection that I fear is too far along the route and
while standing there waiting for the light to change, I tell Sharon
I’m not sure where we are or how to get to where we want to go.
A young woman also
waiting on the light overhears – actually would have been hard not
to – volunteers to help us and gives us directions that will
eventually bring us to our destination. But her directions actually
take us on a much longer walk than we needed to take. Along the way,
Sharon recognizes parts of the town we had seen while driving around
earlier on the bus. She figures out what the best return route we
should take is, a much shorter walk. She's good at that stuff.
Foodie
break: We’ve had sodas in Melbourne from the convenience stores
-- they have 7-11s by the way -- but they were all bottled. And we
encounter a dearth of diet drinks. Diet Coke is a big seller and
available pretty much everywhere, but I don’t drink it. Doesn’t
matter much because giant sodas like we have here apparently don’t
exist. And the bottled drinks have fewer calories than a comparable
sized drink here.
At
the McDonald's, we are able to purchase sodas with ice, the large
being roughly equivalent to a 20 ounce drink at home. There are no
drink machines, no free refills. On the news, though, we hear a
discussion about the obesity problem and whether candy displays at
checkout aisles contributes to the problem. One of the commentators
brings up sugared drinks as part of the discussion. Seems a bit
ludicrous compared with our situation, where folks come to the QT or
RaceTrac with ginormous refillable tanks or to the 7-11 on special
Slurpee promotion days carrying wading pools.
Our evening will be
spent at Earth Sanctuary -- World Nature Center, a carbon-neutral
event venue that hosts ecology, culture and astronomy
tours, weddings, and tourist events such as the one we're on. We’ll be fed an Aussie barbecue and have
the opportunity to sample damper -- a kind of camp bread. We’re
also entertained by the owners who talk about the kinds of animal
tracks that can be found in the Outback and give us the backstory to
“Waltzing Matilda,” which according to them is really about a
traveler dancing with his bedroll. After the minimal exposure we'll
have to the Outback, though, dancing with a bedroll seems reasonable
A didgeridoo player
performs while we’re eating. He’s not aboriginal and plays
“contemporary” didgeridoo works, but I don’t know enough about
the music to know the difference. He’s supposed to be one of the
premier players in the country though. At the end of his set, he
pulls out a bunch of instruments to pass out among the crowd and
attempts to teach us how to play. I’m able to produce some of the
sounds, but I can’t sustain them. Apparently you have to use your
diaphragm to pull in air at the same time you’re blowing out.
Pretty cool skill if you can pull it off.
We end the night
with an astronomy lesson, looking at the Southern Cross and learning
how to use it in conjunction with the Pointers to find south. We also
have a spectacular view of the Milky Way because we are far from the kind
of light pollution that reduces the famous ribbon to a so-what
dribble of stars across the sky. The star views alone would have made
it a great night.
Our group has
loosened up at this point, more so than the two drinks they've been
served during the evening can account for, and we have a pretty rowdy
ride back to the hotel. But the evening saved the Alice Springs
stopover for me.
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