Oh my, people come and go so quickly

Alice Springs is a community smack in the middle of the outback. It has a main street, Todd Street, with a mall at one end, and well, nothing really at the other end.

Coming into town, on my way to the Malanka Motel, it reminded me of southern California, and I never did shake the feeling that it was a beach town that had misplaced it’s beach.It has that kind of buzz that towns have when the population is principally transient.

The tourist industry provides plenty of jobs with a dynamic turnover. People kind of get stuck there. I met a few in a Pub and not one of them was from Alice Springs, and, not one of them knew anyone from Alice Springs. That is of course ignoring the Aborigines, as one tends to do in Alice Springs.

I wanted to try “Aussie” food and someone at the Malanka backpackers motel recommended a "posh" steakhouse where they have Kangaroo, Camel, Crocodile, Emu, and Buffalo on the menu. OK, I should have known better, plus I failed to pick up on several clues. For example, next to the restaurant entrance was a sign proudly proclaiming this as the home of the 21 oz. steak (Side note, most things in Australia are the biggest, oldest, cheapest, deadliest, or oddest, etc…These claims are sometimes true.

The hostess escorted me to the back room, table 41, with a good view of the stage. The singer-guitar player on stage looked promising. The hostess seemed chatty and asked where I was from. I said Switzerland, and she left. I briefly wondered why people were sitting in the front room of the restaurant with so many nice tables vacant back here near the stage.

Then the hostess came back with a little Swiss flag and stood it on my table. I spun around, scanned the room, and saw that all the occupied tables had little flags; German, Italian, Belgian, Israeli and one lone Australian. Trapped! Too late to run: I had already ordered wine (which they forgot to bring).

I wolfed down my Kangaroo steak (pretty tasty) and cold vegetables, as quickly as I could, but still, by the time I’d finished my meal I’d had to sit through: multiple "sing-along’s" including Waltzing Matilda; a precious girl-child -- at the prompting of the damned guitar player -- running amok making thunder noises with a big piece of cardboard; and people, grownups (I shit you not), hopping, barking, braying, quacking and mooing in time to the music. It was the restaurant on the corner of Sesame Street and the Road of Good Intentions.

The Vortex

In the Malanka motel travel office I met Kathy. She was knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and seemed able to get deals on just about everything, and by the time I left there I felt I’d booked most of the rest of my life. This is where I fell into the Vortex.

My previous experience with adventure tours have been exciting, challenging and for the most part, off the beaten path, so I booked an 11 day adventure tour, with an adventure tour company called, Australian Adventure Tours.

“Adventure”, in this case, however, turned out to be one of those antipodean spins on on English. My 11-day adventure tour was actually 3 back-to-back standard, no, not standard, backpacker’s, tours, and that means hectic, cheap, and the more the merrier the profit.

The first three days went something like this: board the bus early, wait for the kids used to mom waking them, drive, get out, climb a rock, take it’s picture, board the bus, drive, photograph rocks in the setting sun, get on the bus, set up camp, cook, eat, clean, set up your swag, have a beer, sleep, get up early, get on the bus, get off the bus, take photo of rocks with sun rise, get on bus, go back to camp, prep breakfast, clean up, get on the bus…

In my case I was lucky, because the first “tour-ette” was further subdivided, and half the group went back to Alice Springs on the third day and a handful of us had two days at a slower pace to Palm Canyon and Glen Helen Gorge, which we had pretty much all to ourselves, pub, swimming holes and all.