33c, clear skies and 350km meant a long hot drive to Alice Springs. Arrived at 1330 and headed straight to McD's for chips and ice-cream, plus a free helping of air-con! The site we were staying at, another Big4, was the McDonald Ranges Park which was well nice! So nice to not have to share the toilet facilities with half the native wildlife for a while, so we stayed for 3 nights to recover.

First night was hilarious as the family next to us consisted of 5 late teenager girls and their folks, who all slept on swags (open sleeping bags) in the open and were in bed by 9pm right across from the camp kitchen! Bloomin hilarious as you could hear them snooring and farting LOL! We have noticed that everyone at campsites tends to go to bed at 8-9pm every night, but you'd think they would get up early too but they don't!! Weird?!?!

Enough of the campsite, on to Alice Springs. We had been looking forward to getting to a bigger town after being in the sticks for so long and we'd heard nice things about it, but unfortunately these nice things had come from the Alice Springs tourist book. We've now learnt our lesson not to trust these books because Alice Springs was a proper dump. Hate to come across as whinging but there is no way to sugar coat it, it was just run down, loads of boarded up shops and just basically a dump. This is the only place as well where they have charged us to use toilets in public? No idea why? Oh, and Alice Springs was also full of Aboriginal people. Now we wouldn't mind this at all, but the ones here were a nightmare. They just gorp at you when you walk past, most of them are drunk and everyone we walked past totally stunk! Ozzies in the Outback don't hide the fact they don't like Aborigines here and we didn't understand that until we got to Alice Springs where they just make you feel uncomfortable and threatened. Weird feeling, so we ended up spending most of our time at the campsite.

We did venture out to the "main tourist attraction" in Alice Springs, The Reptile Centre, but when we got there it was the size of a portacabin and they charge you $12 each so we didn't bother. Cue guidebook getting thrown in the bin!

But we did happen to time our visit to Alice Springs with THE EVENT of the year (oh boy), The Henley-on-Todd Regatta, which is a boat race held on the Todd river. But being the desert, of course the river is bone dry! But Ozzies are resilient devils so they cut the bottoms out the boats, and stand in them, pick em up and "Flintstones" them up the river! Fair play to them as it was 35c, dusty as heck but they sure pulled in a crowd and it was fun to watch. Also, alongside this there was a 20th Anniversary Variety Car Rally where hundreds of cars themed to look like all manner of things (shrek, batman, tigers, dumb & dumber) happened to be passing through Alice Springs at the same time so that was cool to look at all them too. I think without these two events you'd be proper stumped for something to see in Alice so we're grateful for that.

Tomorrow we leave for Uluru! WOOHOO!