After a night traveling on the Ghan, we disembarked at Alice Springs around 9am . I had slept very well overnight, the vibrations from the wheels acting a bit like one of those massage chairs. As well as awaking feeling incredibly relaxed, an additional fitness boost was had as my watch on the side table had clocked up 12000 steps for the day before I had even put it on. Jeanette, however, had been kept awake most of the night by the noise of the train and was feeling a little secondhand.
We got off the Ghan, collected our cases and sat down in the terminal to wait for our tour. After nearly an hour had passed they showed up, we got on their coach and were driven to the top of Anzac Hill which overlooks the town of Alice Springs and were told we had 15 minutes to check out the view. After that we were driven to our hotel. It was around 10:30 am and that was it from the tour’s view till a gathering at 5:30 that evening.
Problem was that our room at the hotel would not be available till 3pm in some four and a half hour’s time. The hotel was situated along the banks of the Todd River some twenty minutes walk from the town so we had our baggage stored and walked into Alice.
It was a pretty walk into town by the river gums with the broad sandy expanse of the Todd river alongside us. We passed by their Botanical Gardens which looked much like the surrounding country side, the only difference being it had a fence around it. There was a small rocky hill on our right before the bridge into town and there on a ledge above us. Jeanette saw a Rock Wallaby enjoying the morning sun. Me, being of a cynical nature, suggested that it might have been a stuffed one superglued to the rock by the local tourist bureau, but it moved its head and we sighted three more of them each sitting in the morning sun on their particular rock observing the world passing by below.
And so into town. We found a place that did good coffee, wandered around the town and then walked back to our hotel arriving shortly before 1pm. I pleaded with the receptionist and we finally got given access to our room where I worked on the previous day’s blog post while Jeanette got acquainted with the hotel’s laundry.
At the 5:30 pm briefing I think I managed to get ourselves labeled as the group’s troublemakers by going head to head with the tour guide on the question of luggage. The brochure sent out by the tour company had a page dealing with baggage limits . Essentially it said each individual was entitled to bring a bag weighing less than 16kgs and with the total of the cases height, width and depth not to exceed 150cms. We had carefully complied with that but having arrived in Alice Springs with our two complying cases, our guide now claimed that the baggage allocation was one case per couple. After some back and forth he agreed that while we were in fact entitled to two cases, he didn’t have room for them on the bus so some extreme late night repacking got us rearranged with one bag to take and one to go in storage. The vibes with this outfit are not great.
Hardys’ Travels 