Project 60 - Number 25 Visiting Alice Springs

This is a Bucket List one. I read Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice when I was thirteen and after that I wanted to visit Alice Springs really badly. It's taken me rather a long time to get there! but The Ghan goes through it and you stop there for another excursion.

Here is the famous camel statue at the station

and this is The Ghan logo

 

so it should come as no surprise that the excursion we chose in Alice was a camel ride.

 

We've done this before in Tunisia, and ever since I have wanted to d it again, because when we did it in Tunisia I was so worried about either falling off, or my camel deciding to make a dash for freedom over the dunes and into the depths of the Sahara, that I didn't really enjoy the experience as much as I should have done. So the idea was that this time, with the benefit of hindsight, I would be fairly sure I wasn't going to fall off and could be more in the moment.

 

It sort of worked. I felt really sorry for our camel as the OH and I were both put on it which seemed a big ask. And it was very very  hot, so that made it slightly uncomfortable. And as I remembered from Tunisia the worst bit was actually getting off the camel, which seems, when your camel flops itself back down at the end of the ride, to be fairly impossible, so I was a bit worried about that.

 

Apart from that and a piece of bad behaviour from our camel half way round, it was fine. There was a  brief photo stop after about 30 minutes, where the group leader takes pictures of you on your camel and gives you a bit of a talk about camels, how to look after them, what lovely animals they are etc etc. Which would have been fine had our camel not made a unilateral decision to sit down while that was going on. Once he was down, he had to made to get up again, and can I just say that the worst possible thing about riding a camel, even worse then trying to get off it, is leaning backwards and hanging on to the harness like grim death while it gets itself into a standing position. I thought it very unfriendly of our camel to do that to us twice!

 

But you know, on the upside, we didn't fall off.

 

 

 

Picture taken by the OH. (Incidentally that blouse you can just see with the pretty floral print? That's a cotton silk mix from Marks and Spencer and it wasn't the cheapest blouse I ever bought. I regret to say  that it fell to ribbons after about six washes. Literally ribbons. It just split along the grain in several places. You could put your finger through the fabric with no effort at all. Impressed? Not so much really. I won't be buying any more anyway.)

You can see what the landscape is like from the photo. Having heard so much about the Red Centre we were expecting it to be totally without vegetation, but in fact there were just acres of this scrubby stuff, not just here but for hours and hours out of the train window.

 

I loved it. Must go back!