Austin to Alice

Apart from names beginning with A, these two recently visited places have one or two more similarities - extreme heat, holiday mode and new to be explored. There are also many differences – Alice Springs is hot and mostly dry where Austin was hot and humid, at least that's how it was when I was there in early June. I didn't ride any camels in Austin or listen to any ass kickin' blues in Alice, and of course they are thousands of miles apart on different continents, the middle of Australia versus the southern central edge of the United States.

I didn't encounter any bed bugs in Austin either – travelers beware the Desert Rose Hotel in Alice!

The flight in to Alice left Melbourne on a cool gray morning. The excitement of the guy seated next to me when he saw green as we approached the ground told me the sight was unusual. I certainly didn't expect to see so much green in the red centre. More rain than usual in early December before the start of the wet apparently. Global warming or just an unusual year? Who can tell, but like exceptionally warm weather in Scotland, rain is welcome in the dust bowl that is Alice.

I learn that the dry appearance here in the centre of Australia is just that – there is a water table sometimes as close as a few metres under the ground. Rivers flow from nowhere to nowhere then sink under the ground. The river running through Alice is dry and is only expected to flow every few years.

It has already flowed three times this year according to Lindsay our young tour guide on the trip to the McDonnell range. These mountains are quite spectacular – older than anything I have seen – and apparently named after yet another far traveling Scotsmen from the 1860s when others were exploring the interior of Africa. This one was just as eccentric as any and an alcoholic in his spare time.

But I digress. The distances are long and the views unchanging. Red earth, red dust, very old rocks, ochre pits that only initiated aboriginal males are allowed to mine. The colors are purple, yellow and white or pale gray.

The inner lives and culture of what is believed to be the oldest human race on earth remain a mystery to me. People gather under trees in the dry river bed and sit for hours. Many do not 'succeed' in modern Australian society. The custom of living in cities is alien and unwelcome. The people are very dark skinned with distinctive features, thin legs, small frames and curly hair that goes gray but does not seem to recede or fall out. Many different languages are spoken, as they are across other nations where tribes are many and distances vast. It remains alien to modern times how these people deal with the heat, travel huge distances and find food and water in the bush (bush tucker includes ants that taste like lemon and other 'icky' things). It is sad to see this once great race reduced to small numbers and more or less confined to community lands with defined boundaries. Not uncommon though as humans progress through the ages and emergent races dominate earlier established ones

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