Alice Springs

Made it to Alice Springs, via Adelaide -

After a night in Adelaide, we boarded the Ghan Railway to head north through the Outback to the small town of Alice Springs (if you can picture Australia, and the middle of it is the Outback, Alice Springs is in the middle of that). The Ghan, which is celebrating 80 years of connecting Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north (hitting Alice Springs in the middle), is so named because it follows trails blazed by Afghan camel drivers in their quest to create a permanent path across the center of the continent. And looking at the scenery around the train, I can't imagine making this journey without a car or train. Either side is red dirt and sparse, scrubby bushes as far as the eye can see, under a hot sun and a cloudless sky. According to the on-board magazine, the first Ghan had plenty of trouble even after the tracks were laid - flash flooding could strand the train at on town or another, or even somewhere in the middle (legend has it that the train was once stranded for 10 days and the engineer fed his passengers by hunting wild goats), but in the 70s the railway was redone with a slightly different route out of most floodplains, as well as the addition of a more durable railway.
Sunrise in the Outback was amazing, though I do wish I could've gotten some sleep in before it... I took plenty of pictures, but I don't have a way of uploading them from this computer, so that'll have to wait until I'm back at UTS, when I'll document everything in more detail.

Anyway, right now the plan is to spend tomorrow in Alice Springs and then go on the 3 day hike the day after (a couple people came in who had to leave a day earlier than us and wanted to get on the earlier tour, so we gave them our spots since we had planned for an extra day in Alice Springs after the tour anyway). It ought to be a great trip!