THE ALICE - PART TWO

It’s come the time to say goodbye to Alice Springs. On Friday we are packing up our campsite of 3 months and heading for home via Port Lincoln (to visit some friends), the Nullarbor & Esperance.
So this will be the end to the blogs (I hear you all say – thank goodness)….but you never know there may be more travel/adventures that we could write about. You'll get the link in the usual fashion if there is more.
Alice has been a great place to say a while. We feel almost part of the place and have really enjoyed meeting fellow travellers and have made friends with a few of the locals as well.
As mentioned in our part one Alice Blog, we did travel 500km north of here to Tenant Creek for a look and spent a night on the way back at the Devils Marbles - a fascinating collection of sandstone boulders about 100km south of Tenant Creek. The dingos were a plenty there, they inspected our campsite, howled all night and generally gave us the hebbie geebies in our little tent!
Another time we drove west to Hermannsburg (a Lutheran mission established late 1800’s/early 1900’s) then onto King Canyon via Mereenie Loop (a rattle bang dirt road). Speaking of dirt roads; we have done a few in the area including, Ernest Giles Road, Plenty Highway, the Sandover Highway, Binns Track and Arltunga tourist drive (Binns & Arltunga are some of the roughest roads – or should I say goat tracks – we’ve been on since that awful drive into the Bungle Bungles in the Kimberley’s).
We fossicked for Garnets at Gemtree (about an hour and half north-east of here) with limited success…suffice to say we are having some ground & polished for a ring and earrings for Ingrid. On that trip we also went into the East Macs and enjoyed a walk in N’Dhala (there was an awesome 4WD track into this nature park with sand hills and various creek crossings) and Trephina gorges plus a visit to Emily and Jessie Gaps.
Another great place we visited was Santa Teresa; an aboriginal community about an hour’s drive on yet another rough dirt road south east of Alice. The community there was lovely with an awesome church and great facilities including a modern school, town pool and up to date health clinic. The proverbial cheeky dogs still hung about though!!!
A real highlight in the many things there are to do and see here was a visit with Chris the kangaroo man to his roo-rescue sanctuary near the Alice airport. Ingrid and friend Barbara were able to feed the little and not so little roo’s. It was an awesome evening not to be forgotten.
Apart from all that we have kept up with the markets, cafes, restaurants, climbs up Mt Gillen, Desert Park visits, cycle rides to Simpsons Gap, lovely walks & picnics in the area.
Alice will leave a lasting impression on us both and you never know but it might be a place we comeback to for a while in the years to come.
Anyway thanks to you all for reading these dissertations. We hope you have enjoyed hearing some of our adventures as much as we have enjoyed experiencing them. We also wish that it gives you all some incentive to do something similar as you’ll find it well worth the effort.