The Alice - A Tale of Two Towns

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February 14th 2009

Published: February 14th 2009

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Drinkthewater

beginning

the start of the trip - the bus from Bendigo to Adelaide

It was only as I drove out of Melbourne on Saturday Feb 6, that I found out that while I’d been having a good time the night before and doing the final cleaning up of the unit I was renting, to move out, that Victoria had had the worst bushfires ever. At the time they were saying something like 68 people dead, but this number is still climbing and last I heard sat at over 180. The destruction in the Bendigo/Eaglehawk area was evident from the massive numbers of road closures.

After two days in Bendigo visiting my family, I took the coach from Bendigo to Adelaide. Downtown Adelaide on a Tuesday night turnhttp://www.travelblog.org/Admin/edit-entry.htmls out to not be a terribly happening place. The next day I walked to the Ghan, and just made it on time. The Ghan, the famous rail line from Adelaide to Darwin, has several classes of service: Platinum service, Gold service, Red Sleeper Service, and Red Service. I recommend if you do it, you try the gold service. I did the Red Service. It’s a bit like sitting in an airplane for 54 hours (less two four-hour stopovers), except without the cute waitresses bringing you complimentary

Red Service diner

the diner for the red service - the only place with a good view, but one was only allowed to sit here to eat food or drink drink bought on the train

booze. The windows are too thick and steamy to get good photos, there’s no lounge car and the food is pretty ordinary. I felt like my trip had started though, when I needed to improvise - charging the laptop in the toilets on the plug intended for the hand-drier, and using a disposable paper cup as a funnel to fill my water bottle from the small drinking fountain. One or two people looked at upgrading to Red Sleeper service but reported that while they did indeed have sleeper cabins, they looked very pokey, particularly if you had to share with a stranger.

A few hours into the trip, the train stopped for one hour in Port Augusta. This was just enough time to walk around the central part of town. It looked nicer than I remembered it from the last brief transit ten years ago. Soon after that the scenery changed, to open grasslands which reminded me of Africa. By the second day, in my sleep-deprived state, I kept expecting to see a heard of giraffes grazing in the hills in the distance. I spent the last few hours before Alice Springs talking to an 88-year-old WW2 veteran who

the ghan

The Ghan train, on the station at Port Augusta

was on his way to Darwin for the 67th anniversary of the first bombing of Darwin, the only surviving representative of his Company(?) He told me, five different times in the one conversation, that during WW2, Australia’s entire population had been 7.5 million.

Around Alice Springs the scenery changed again, with more bushes. The train stopped for four hours in Alice, where I was booked on a whistlestop tour of sacred Aboriginal sites. I’m somewhat ambivalent about this sort of tourism. The obvious argument for it is that it values the indigenous culture, brings in money for the community, educates the outside world about their culture. However, I’ve seen too many fake welcoming dances and been offered too much tacky handicraft to be entirely convinced. Everywhere I go I find the same sort of people running the place, and the indigenous people selling handicraft. I worry that our interest in preserving and valuing other cultures is turning them into dancers and makers of beads.

Anyway, having already decided to go, with a bit of bother I found where we were supposed to be meeting. A Ghan staff member was on the phone trying to organize things, and there

Port Augusta

part of Port Augusta, near the station

were to be three of us on the tour: me plus a couple I judged to be in their mid-60s. They looked and talked as if they might have come off the platinum service.

“So the Aboriginal one costs the most and is the one that doesn’t turn up on time” said the platinum-service-type lady.

I tried to change the topic slightly by suggesting that I believed that there were actually other whistlestop tours that were more expensive.

“It’s just we had a friend who did this trip and that’s what they said”, she huffed with a you-can’t-get-good-help-these-days sort of air.

It turns out she was right. The staff member came back, apologizing profusely. Someone had stuffed up somewhere, I didn’t quite hear the part of her explanation that said who, but I didn’t really care. The plantinum-service-type couple were unimpressed. They got a free ride on the shuttle to look around town themselves. I decided that town didn’t look very far away at all, so I’d walk it. It turns out that it was all of 10 minutes walk, despite the shuttle bus reportedly costing $9. Later that evening the Ghan comped my dinner, which

no Jobs

Port Augusta is a pretty town. Could there be anything bad about living here? This sign, outside the main employment agency, might give some clues

was fine by me, although not having to pay for it didn’t of course make it taste any less awful.

Four hours is plenty enough time to walk all around downtown Alice, including into some of the suburbs. So I think I got a little bit of a feel for the place, at least as it is on a Thursday afternoon. NT’s second-largest town, with a population of 26500, is a big centre for all the farmers in surrounding areas, as well as, of course, having a long history catering to tourists and those passing through. It is a picturesque town, nestled in the MacDonnell ranges. It has the usual trappings of an Australian town or suburb of that size - a McDonalds, a Subway restaurant, Video Easy, Eagle Boys Pizza, Kmart, Coles, Woolworths, Target, etc., a mall, a couple of largish, air-conditioned, shopping centres, and all the other good stuff. It has about the number of cafes you might expect from somewhere that gets so many tourists.

It also has a large Aboriginal population. It has a large, dry, river, the Todd, probably a couple of hundred metres across. It seems that here many aboriginal people hang

scenery

an example of the scenery from the train window, between Port Augusta and Alice

out quite aimlessly. Maybe it’s their culture, but they don’t smile a lot. People of all ages crossed the path as I walked, heading in or out of the dry river, some obese, some shaped like skeletons. They mainly kept themselves half-hidden under the shade of trees of clumps of bushes. It didn’t seem like my place to photograph them or investigate more, so I’m not sure if they lived there, or if they just go there to try to replicate their traditional communities.

I think it was here that I fell prey to the first scam of my trip. It usually takes me about a week to get my bullshit detector completely dusted off - it doesn’t get enough exercise in Melbourne. Generally I enjoy the faint edginess that comes with travelling in dodgy places, where you can’t take anything at face value. Whether that enjoyment will last 13 months remains to be seen.

Anyway, a wizened old woman and a wizened old man, both of indeterminate age, on the path before me were talking in an indigenous language. She was sitting blocking the walkway, one leg stretched out in front of her, he had just began

Iron Man

the Iron Man monument, to commemorate the 10(?) millionth sleeper between somewhere and somewhere else. The train actually slowed down for this monument

to walk away. She was clasping something bulky an white, I thought maybe a small rag, onto her leg and making pained noises.

I looked down at her leg and asked “are you OK?”.

“No my leg, do you have any bandages?”

“Oh, I don’t think I do, they’re all in my other pack” I said truthfully. I could probably manage a small battlefield with the stuff in my main backpack, but my daypack is mainly for my cameras, and it was all I had with me.

I bent down to rummage through it to see if there was anything to be used as a bandage. I found an old pair of polypropylene long johns - useful for hiking, they’re also lightweight so I was hoping to use them if there was any cold weather along my trip. I pulled them out and she grabbed them, pulled aside the rag she was holding over her leg, showing a small red mark that didn’t look particularly fresh. She wrapped it around her leg, more in the style of a tourniquet than anything else, before I had the chance to close up my bag.

The man came

dry riverbed

Dry Riverbed, shortly before Alice

back “do you have a phone?” he asked. I asked why he wanted to know.

“To call the hospital. Can I have the phone.” he said.

I turned to the lady “Do you want me to call the hospital? It doesn’t look that bad” I said.

“No”

“Give me the phone” rejoined the man.

“No”, I said “if she wants to go to hospital I’ll dial the number and you can talk to them”

“ok, call …….” He said, rattling off someone’s name, but not their phone number.

By now I had of course figured that it was at least partly a scam. “No I’m not going to do that”, I said, finally.

The lady pulled out two rather talented artworks, from nowhere, and tried to sell them to me for $20. I might have been tempted if I’d had the space to keep them. I told her so, and she stood up and walked off without a limp. I like to imagine they have a house built of mobile phones and nicely decorate with scarves, bandanas, T-shirts, and roller bandages. I now only have one pair of polypro, which is enough

bush

an example of the bush around Alice, from the train window.

for anyone.

In Katherine, most of the whistestop tours didn’t run during the wet. There was one with the option of a hike to the top of the gorge, but I rightly judged that I wouldn’t feel like hiking by the time I got there, so I elected just to get a shuttle bus into town and walk around by myself for four hours. I hadn’t been to the stretch of Australia between Alice and Darwin before, so I was a bit disappointed that most of the trip between Alice and Katherine happened in the dark.

I finally got into Darwin on Friday night, one day after the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, after whom the town is named. The backpackers’ place I was looking for, where I’d stayed years previously, was shut for the night, so I stayed at a place across the road. After a few beers at the Irish pub with a few people I’d met on the Ghan, I retired hoping for an early night after two sleepless nights on the Ghan. This worked well until the others in my dorm came home and three of them started having sex on the top

Alice Springs

tourists taking photos of the Alice Springs station

bed of their bunk.

My blogs will be more interesting soon. I fly out of Darwin tomorrow (Sunday Feb 15). As a young Swede said to me in Adelaide, “backpacking in your own country isn’t much fun”.

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