Travel Tips

Going, going, Ghan!
The Ghan is a historic rail route from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Named for the Afghans who used to travel the route by camel (yes, camel, more on that in another chapter in the Outback travelogue), it was originally (in)famous for being plagued by delays. It's much improved since those earlier days, and now takes a mere 20 hours to get from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It's not that it's slow, it's just that Alice is that far from just about anywhere.

Our trip on the Ghan was mostly uneventful, apart from two rowdy Australian guys at the front of our car verbally abusing passengers from time to time. We experienced another Moritz encounter, as well: not only were Matt and Lara travelling to Alice on the same day that we were, but their seats were also directly behind ours. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya! Our mothers are probably behind it somehow. ;-)
<p>

After a lot of deliberation after our Outback adventure, we decided to stay a while in Alice Springs to "recharge" before heading off to Southeast Asia in mid-April. We interspersed our touristy stuff with sleeping in, wandering around, catching up on email, and writing postcards. It felt a bit weird to stay in one place for so long...almost a week without moving our bags! Imagine! Then again, Alice is a small place (about 25-30,000 people), so staying for a long time pretty much implies taking it easy. We managed to hit a substantial percentage of the major (and a few minor) restaurants in town...sampling emu, crocodile, kangaroo, and camel dishes, along with some more mundane fare.

The next few "chapters" in this travelogue will cover specific places we visited outside of our outback safari, which is a separate travelogue all by itself. :)
<p>

What did we do on our vacation? We went to school! :-)

Imagine a primary school the size of Texas.

With 130 students who see each other 3 times a year.

And 14 teachers who travel thousands of kilometers a year to visit their students at home.

Throw in some radios and computers and you have the School of the Air!

Begun in 1950, the School of the Air was formed to meet the educational needs of the children of park rangers, well-diggers, cattle drovers, and anyone else making a living in the outback. It serves years 1-7, and teachers "meet" with students for lessons once daily via radio. Course materials are distributed by mail plane (and via email -- a recent development), and the students are helped along by their parents or, in some cases, a home tutor retained by the family.

In addition to the daily radio conferences, teachers are kept busy preparing and marking course material, evaluating the students, corresponding with them via email, and occasionally hopping in a 4-wheel-drive to make a circuit of the Northern Territory to visit their students. Each teacher is responsible for a "class" of 10-12 students, who live 100-1000 km in any direction from Alice Springs.

School of the Air also provides lessons to aboriginal children in an "English as a second language" format. Once the aboriginals are comfortable enough with English, they are integrated into the appropriate level of instruction with the other students. Heather and I were there to listen in on a lesson or two; the voice-only interaction between teacher and student worked really well...very impressive.

The School of the Air takes a lot of effort and expense, but it enables children to grow up spending time with their families and still get a first-rate education. After primary school years, students have the option of going to boarding school or continuing their education via correspondence school. The students coming out of the School of the Air are frequently ahead of children their own age academically. The model worked so well in Alice Springs that there are 13 other Schools of the Air serving other remote areas of Australia...most of Australia, as it turns out, is pretty remote. ;-)
<p>

One of the original functions of Alice Springs was as a telegraph relay station. Up until the late 1800's the only way news reached Australia from England was by ship, which meant time lags of 2-3 months. In the 1870's, a plan was formed to link Australia to a telegraph network via undersea cable to Singapore. To solve the problem of signal degradation over the large distances between cities in Australia, a repeater station was established in Alice Springs, next to the deep water hole that gives the current town its name.

We visited the site of the telegraph station (about 4km from the current town center), and learned a little about its history. After its life as a relay station, the collection of buildings was used to house and educate half-aboriginal/half-European children, then for military purposes in WW2 (during which the telegraph link w/ Singapore was severed at Darwin to keep the Japanese from using it). Eventually the site was reconstructed to appear as it had been in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the tour busses started coming in. :)

Our big "win" on this little trip was that our guide had actually been a student at the school in the 1930s, so he was able to tell us some things fromhis first-hand experience ("That grapevine was here when I was here," "We used that stove to cook our dinners, and it still works today," "These are the same oak tables where I did my lessons," etc). It added character to a tour that otherwise might have been just so-so. :-)

Want to learn about th flora and fauna of the Australian Outback without wandering around in the bush? Visit the Desert Park, where outback habitats have been reconstructed in, um, the outback.

Smart-aleck description aside, this was a pretty neat place. The Park's designers did a great job of putting together informative walks through various areas representing the 3 or 4 ecosystems in the outback. Some of the information was old news to us thanks to our bush safari, but of particular note were the varieties of birds, the nocturnal house (where we tried without success to see a bilby, but did get to see malas), and the Birds of Prey presentation, where we got to see a number of the local meat-eating birds fly around a do their thing, with the added "bonus" of watching an eagle in the care of the rangers be harrassed by two more wild eagles who were moving into the area. :-)

The Desert Park is definitely worth a visit if you're in the area. The bus schedule to the Park is a bit goofy; though: it seems to allow either too much time to see things, or not enough. Might be worth renting bikes to manage the trip yourself. :-)