The bus left the Adelaide bus station at 6 pm last night, and we arrived in Alice Springs at 2:30 pm. What is that? 20 and a half hours!
As far as excitement goes, we hit a kangaroo around midnight. As if Mellissa had advised the driver, Josh, he took the roo at full speed and full on (you don't want to swerve and risk rolling over), and all we suffered was a busted head light.
At 5 am we changed drivers, from Josh to Simon, at 6 am I saw my first wild kangaroos (which we barely missed), and at 8 am we stopped for breakfast. Back on the bus Simon came alive, and informed us that he was going to do a bit of tour guiding. From there on he talked almost non-stop (a bit like Glenn), and our small party became a closely-knit traveling cell. We had Therese and her daughter (from the Solomon Islands), Eva (from China), Clara (from Spain), and myself (from Mexico and California), and we chatted/listened happily all the way to Alice Springs.
I forgot to mention that yesterday I met Steve, a wrangler from one of the cattle stations, who was in Adelaide for his one-every-six-months vacation, and he had told me all about the cattle stations in the outback. So when Simon described the largest cattle station around us, about the size of Texas and with about a 100,000 heads of cattle, I could easily imagine Steve wrangling them from a helicopter to the loading station and using horses to load them onto an interminable series of trains. Mind boggling!
Alice Springs is a nice town with a big problem. Apparently over the last couple of years the crime rate has been up, because some of the young aboriginals have been getting drunk and angrily attacking whites, or stealing cars to go joyriding. The word is not to go out at night, but checking with the locals I was assured that the problem is under control. "Just don't do anything stupid."
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