Alice in wonderland

 

Tuesday 23/2

Today we are to join our 4 day AAT Kings tour of Alice Springs and Uluru starting from our hotel.. 

Disaster strikes!

The instructions are quite brief and we need to re-organise our room keys due to some confusion. Eventually it becomes clear we are not booked in for tonight as we are meant to be with the AAT tour. In fact they have no record of an AAT tour starting from here.

Odd. Is there any such tour at all? "Who has made this monumental stuff up?"

So after many phone calls, it becomes clear that we are in the wrong hotel. The tour actually leaves from the hotel down the road, The Double Tree by Hilton at 1.15 pm today.  It seems the travel agent/booking agent has booked us into the wrong hotel?????  We are in fact booked in the ‘right’ hotel but our itinerary has the wrong hotel .

 

We decide to pack and make our way to the ‘right’ hotel which we are assured is a 5 minute walk.

Still with all our luggage, and our various issues, it is quite a trek.

 

It turns out the other hotel is perhaps not quite as good : it has no bathrobes.  However we are reunited with many of our fellow Ghan travellers who are doing the same tour.  And the pool is working unlike a the Crown so a good outcome in the end.

                                                

The hotel has an Asian restaurant and a piano. Pianos are a thing in Alice. Did you know that Burke and Wills took a piano on their journey. No wonder the camels died and in the end so did everyone.

On that note, we commence our day tour of Alice Springs. 

Starting with the Anzac Lookou

                                                                         

 It was an amazing view and very interesting.  Then on to the School of the Air.

This was interesting as we sat in on a class which one of us thought could be done better..  I had no idea they had such a wide area including kids in Papua New Guinea and kids of migrants in England waiting to travel to Australia.

Next was  a tour of the Telegraph station, very famous as this is were Alice Springs sprung.   This was the beginning of communication from the outback to the world and vice versa. And look, a piano.

We also went past the spot where hundreds of planes are being stored amidst Covid (global pandemic).

And then on to the Royal Flying doctor Service headquarters. What an amazing service they offer and much was made of the security provided to outback families knowing they are there. We watched a short movie which made me cry (what movie doesn't?) and left feeling we want to support them as much as possible (and grow up to be a pilot).

This is the medical kit in years gone by.

Nice plane

Our final stop was to the Reptile park. Interesting but their crocodile is smaller than Eric  at our reptile park on the central coast. However the guide was entertaining and made it much more interesting than it actually was.

He got a little too close to the crocodile for my liking after explaining that crocs don't kill people for food, it is just because they can.

Eating a chicken.

We had a great dinner at the Asian restaurant at the hotel with the couple we met on the Train and had not realized were on much the same tours as us due to the hotel confusion.

It ended up being a great day. Tomorrow on our way to Uluru