Well, you know you're doing alright when the hotel has a sunken bar right in the middle of the swimming pool, don't you? You don't even have to get out to get a drink - just swim up to any of the underwater marble bar stools attached to the side, plonk yourself down without getting out of the water and order a drink. What unashamed luxury.

Alice Springs tends to be a base for backpackers passing through the centre of Australia, as it is easy to pick up a tour from here to any number of natural or man made attractions in the area - other than Uluru, of course, which is why most people head here in the first place. We didn't have to get up early yesterday morning, and spent the day taking a leisurely drive out to some of these attractions on the coach with Mike acting as both driver and guide. First up, we stopped at the Alice Springs headquarters of the world famous Royal Flying Doctor Service, immortalised by a particularly bad Australian soap opera of the same name set in the fictional town of Coopers Crossing. Unlike the soap, of course, the real Flying Doctor service is not staffed by perfect looking models without a blemish between them, and very seldom do any of them have time between the important work of saving peoples lives to throw each other over the desk for a passionate snog just for the sake of it, before looking dramatically to camera and flicking their hair as the titles roll. Especially as all the people there today were men. The Flying Doctor Service was originally set up in 1928 to provide help for people of the outback for whom there would otherwise be none - after all, if you live on a cattle farm the size of a small European country and the total human population of the area is five, there probably isn't much chance of an ambulance getting to you anytime soon in an emergency. In fact, until the Flying Doctor service began, it would probably have been quicker to go and fetch a rusty knife from the barn and try to perform the surgery yourself. With planes, of course, help could get anywhere much quicker - and it is for the benefit of the Flying Doctors that all settlements, farmsteads and even pubs across the outback have a tendency to scrawl their name in large white block lettering across the roof.

Our visit to the headquarters of the Flying Doctors included a twenty minute film telling us the history of the service, and a walk through the radio room where the mayday messages are received. In the adjoining museum, old equipment is on display showing how far the service has come over the years and what they have had to work with in the past, and the tour ends with the almost compulsory cafe and gift shop so that you can spend your money - at least, on this occasion, we knew that it would be going to a good causes.

After leaving the RFDS visitors centre, we drove out to the nearby MacDonnell ranges to see Simpsons Gap, which naturally involved another walk. I'm sure that if AAT Kings - the company running our tour - could somehow work out how to make money for every metre marched by it's tour groups as it takes them around Australia, they could pretty quickly close the company down and all retire in luxury. Luckily for our poor worn out feet, we only had a few hundred metres to walk this time - a hike which took us through the trees at the base of the range to Simpsons Gap, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a gap in the rock within which, at the time, there was a beautiful sparkling pool. Australia has a habit of taking you by surprise in this way - nearly everything you want to see involves walking a long way or hiking up the side of something ridiculously steep and unyielding, but when you get to your destination you always forget the problems you had getting there and go "Wow". It does, however, sometimes amaze me how the locals decide what visitors would be interested in seeing and what they would not - Simpsons gap, for example, is just a gap in the rocks where a small pool has formed. It's a lovely place, and definitely a photo opportunity, but who decided out of all the similar places in the area that this was the one visitors would like to see? Simpson, I expect.

Standley Chasm, however, captured my interest straight away. I'm still not altogether sure that "chasm" is exactly the right word to use to describe the place to tourists - the dictionary defines the word as meaning a large fissure in the rock, and, although this is certainly an apt description of our second stop of the day, it's a little misleading as most of the people I've asked were under the impression that a chasm was far more of a deep bottomless pit. Standley Chasm, needless to say, it not a deep bottomless pit. About thirty kilometres to the west of Alice Springs, a twenty minute scramble over the rocks took us to the entrance to the chasm where a clear lake flows between two sheer rock faces. On either side, plants grow from the walls and water trickles over pebbles, and I felt it was one of the prettiest places we had seen on the trip. At certain times of year, however, Stanley Chasm can become flooded and only parts of it remain accessible - but we were lucky in that we were able to climb down and move freely between the different areas, hauling ourselves over the rocks. In places, the space between opposite walls was so thin that some of the larger members of our party had trouble getting through. Sometimes, a rock wallaby would peer down at us as we made our way past the rocky ledge on which it was sitting, but mostly we were too busy trying not to cut our hands to notice - this was really getting back to nature.

The walk itself wasn't particularly difficult - in fact, I would go so far as to say that it was one of the easiest we've had - but there was certainly a lot of scrambling around to be done. The older members of the party had chosen wisely by deciding to stay back on the coach.

One of the things our driver casually mentioned in passing as we drove around the Alice Springs area, and which struck me as so unbelievably brilliant that I just had to do some research into it when I got home, was the now infamous Henley-On-Todd regatta. If you didn't already regard Australians as ever so slightly strange, the Henley-on-Todd really does do an excellent job of clearing things up once and for all. What you have to remember, to start with, is that Alice Springs is just about in the centre of the country and surrounded by scorching hot desert, so the chances of actually having any sort of river on which to hold a regatta are more or less nil - in fact, if a local was to find a small puddle somewhere while he was out walking one day, it would probably make the news. Of course, the outback does have the occasional massive downpour of rain, and the local river does actually flow on very rare occasions when pigs can be seen flying low over the region and the devil is skating to work, but even then it only manages to put in the effort for a few hours before drying up again. All the same, even those Aussies who have been out in the sun for too long without a hat and are suffering from delirium aren't daft enough to think that anyone can organise a major boating event at the last minute according to when the weather forecast says it might rain, so they've come up with a solution: have the regatta anyway and race the boats by carrying them along the dry diver bed!

Almost every year since 1962, late August or early September has seen people converging on Alice Springs from all over the world to witness the planet's only dry boat race. Created originally by shrewd local government officials to both bring visitors into the region and put some fun into the lives of people scattered across the small townships of the Northern Territories, the race was designed as a comical version of the famous Oxford and Cambridge boat race - a race which was originally held on a course at Henley-On-Thames in London and has since moved several times and become an annual event watched by millions across Britain via the magic of television. The obvious problem of the nearest permanent body of water being 1,500 kilometres away from Alice Springs was never seen as much of a problem, as Australians have a habit of deciding to do something ridiculously unlikely and then worrying about how to do it later. The answer, in the end, was to turn the event into far more of a sociable occasion than anything remotely serious and suggest to the contestants that they should turn up with an old worn out boat from which the bottom had been removed and then race each other along the dry river bed wearing it like a skirt. Unfortunately, nobody has yet thought to televise the Henley-On-Todd across the world, which is a crying shame as I would much rather watch a bunch of Australian nutcases dashing around the desert in bottomless boats than teams of toffee-nosed twits from English Universities trying to out-row each other on the Thames. Of course, in these days of modern technology, the Henley-On-Todd now has a website on which you can watch the events live via video feeds - so come August or September, I'll have my feet up in front of the computer with a big bag of popcorn ready to watch what must be one of the strangest sporting events on the planet. You may have noticed, by the way, that I said the race has been held "almost" every year since 1962 - in a superb example of irony only possible in Australia, the entire event had to be called off in 1993 due to flooding: after some debate, it was decided that there was simply too much water in the river and that everybody would have to go home!

The Henley-On-Todd has changed quite a bit over the years. Back in the sixties, it was just a bit of light hearted fun involving people running around in canoes with holes cut out of them and passers-by stopping their cars to peer over the bridge and see what the hell was going on. These days, the event is a major media circus in the area, involving streets packed with cars and people camped out enjoying the festival atmosphere. Contestants aren't even expected to supply their own boats - all you have to do is register to take part in the race and the people in charge will give you a bottomless boat on arrival. I assume that this is probably to ensure that all the boats are the same weight and that nobody has an unfair advantage, but it also might have something to do with the fact that not many people would be too keen to take a chainsaw to the bottom of their boat just so they can stick their legs through the hole and run around in the desert. For those of a more artistic bent, there are also specialist races in which you are permitted to enter a boat you've designed yourself - these are, of course, the races for which most people flock from miles around: it isn't every day you get to see people running down a dry river bed wearing a Viking longboat, a Chinese Dragonboat or a three storey scale model of the Titanic which the runner can barely lift up. Many participants actually forget that it's a boat race at all, and it isn't at all unusual to see people racing along with their legs sticking out of the bottom of a bath tub or wearing a giant costume which has clearly been stolen from the back of some carnival float somewhere. Just in case things should ever get a little dull, there are even battle races in which specially kitted out boats allow the teams to attack each other with high powered water cannons in an attempt to stop their competitors reaching the finishing line first. The Henley-On-Todd is also what must be the world's only audience participation sport - if someone from the audience just decides to jump in and start racing for the finishing line, there certainly isn't anyone that's going to stop them. In fact, they might even win. In what other sport is there a chance that the gold medal might go to somebody who wasn't even supposed to be taking part? The whole event is clearly all good natured fun, unless you happen to be on the receiving end of a blast to the face from a high powered water cannon - and the more I think about it, the more it sounds like exactly the sort of thing I would've expected the production team of "It's a Knockout" to come up with in the seventies...

I was awakened this morning at the crack of dawn - earlier, actually: 3.45 - by my early morning call. I certainly don't envy those members of staff at hotels around the world, especially in places like the outback where you aren't exactly going to be expecting people to be coming back from a nightclub at 3am, who have to sit up all night waiting to call people up and tell them to get out of bed. While I was hurriedly getting dressed, there was a sharp rapping on my door as the couple from the adjoining room, also on the tour, ensured that I was up and ready for our early morning balloon trip over the red centre, something which I wouldn't have wanted to miss for the world. The shuttle bus was waiting for us outside reception at quarter past four, and we made a short tour around other hotels in Alice Springs to pick up other people who were joining us. Half an hour into the bush, our driver ushered us off of the bus and released a small helium filled balloon in order to check wind speed and direction - then, we all got back on board again and we drove somewhere else where he did exactly the same thing again. After checking conditions in different places three or four times, the driver finally seemed to decide where the best location would be to take off from, and we drove off the road and along a bumpy track towards one of several pre-determined launch locations.

Before we could go anywhere, the balloon had to be inflated, and nobody was going to let us get away with just sitting around and watching somebody else do all the work. Together, we all helped to get both the balloon and its basket off of the trailer being pulled behind the bus and then to carry it to the take off area. Inflating the balloon and attaching the basket, however, was all done by the experts - we at this point were able to sit back on convenient rocks and watch. The sun was starting to make an appearance by now, so we had a spectacular outback sunset to watch as the driver and his helpers inflated the balloon - I'd had the presence of mind to take my video camera with me and was able to capture the sun slowly rising with the balloon and workers silhouetted against it. However, there was also a professional film-maker with us who was capturing everything for an hour long video which we would be able to buy copies of after the balloon ride - so I wasn't too worried about missing anything.

Our group was split into two separate flights as they only allow fourteen people in the basket at any one time. While we watched the first group enviously as they rose gracefully into the air and disappeared over the outback, I got talking to one of the women on the bus, Nicola, who started to tell me how she was scared of heights and was doing this in order to overcome her fears - suddenly, I had visions of us being suspended in the air over the desert with a mad woman screaming and shouting and demanding to be taken back to the ground. But, fortunately, this worry was tempered by the fact that Nicola is one of the most attractive young ladies we have on the tour - so I was far more interested in the fact that she was actually talking to me than by any chance that I might find myself being thrown over the side of the basket by a crazy person.

Balloons cannot be steered, as such, and just go where the wind takes them. For this reason, there was absolutely no way that the first group would be able to come back to the take off point. Therefore, the rest of us crowded back onto the bus and spent what seemed like the best part of an hour chasing the balloon across the outback, bumping down dusty tracks and across barren desert until we finally caught up with it as it started to come back down to earth - landing, slightly worryingly, on its side so that everyone inside ended up lying on top of each other and had to clamber all over each other to get out. I started to wonder whether having a beautiful young woman on my flight who might be panicking and clinging to me and would probably end up rolling all over me in the dirt trying to get out of the basket would be such a bad prospect after all. The basket was divided into four sections, which was probably more to give it stability than to keep us away from each other - although, to be honest, we did rock about a bit on take off and landing, so I suppose it was a bit of a blessing that we weren't falling all over each other. In my section, it was a bit cramped. With me, I had not only Nicola but also a friendly Belgian policeman who we have nicknamed the laughing policeman due to his constant wide grin and habit of holding his stomach and laughing his head off, his wife and a friend of Nicola'sthat she had bumped into earlier in the trip. There really wasn't much room to breath, let alone move. Still, I suppose the idea of this was to make sure we were well buffered for landing.

For the first few minutes of our flight, we stayed quite near the ground so that the photographer could run along and take photos of us taking off. Then, we rose sharply into the air as the pilot turned a valve and flames roared upwards into the balloon, heating the air and creating lift. It seemed to me that the balloon was incredibly easy to fly - I mean, obviously the pilot had to know things such as the wind direction and speed, but generally flying the balloon seemed to involve not much more than turning a valve on or off so that we would rise or fall. The ground fell rapidly away, and as we sailed through the early morning air over the outback, the only sound was the occasional roar of the gas jets which were keeping us up. Of course, the jets were just a few feet away from our ears - so they always startled us when they came on after ten minutes of peaceful flying with no sound at all - but, as loud noises go, ones that are caused by something which is preventing you from plummeting to your death are probably the ones I am most likely to put up with.

Our pilot was a British guy who looked uncannily like Brian Dennehy from FX - Murder by Illusion. He was almost as smiley as the average Australian, and very helpful indeed - taking our cameras and snapping away for us without once accidentally dropping them over the side. I took some great film of the ground dropping away beneath us and of kangaroos starting to get up for an early morning bounce. This, of course, was something which the professional film-maker on the ground wouldn't be able to capture, so I figured I'd stitch it all together later and make people wonder how I had managed to both film from within the balloon and get footage of the balloon sailing across the sky.

Our flight lasted for about half an hour, quite a bit less time than the first group had taken due to the wind picking up, but it seemed longer anyway - totally debunking the old myth that time drags only when you're bored. The stillness up there, and the wonder of staring down at the ground and the creatures wandering across it unaware of our presence, are enough to make you forget the passage of time. When we finally came in to land, and after I had climbed off of Nicola and then had a sit down for a while to get over the experience, we were all given a breakfast of Champagne and chicken - not, perhaps, the most obvious of combinations. They really do seem to like celebrating anything with Champagne over here: "You've climbed Uluru, have some Champagne."... "You've ridden a balloon, Champagne for everyone."... "You've put one foot in front of the other, Champagne!". The bus had apparently followed us across the outback with the first group on board, and by the time we landed there were picnic tables set up covered in food and early morning flies. After eating, we all had a group photo taken with our own cameras by lining them up on the picnic table and having the driver take a photo with each in turn. It would be interesting to look at the end result of every camera to see if we could all be seen slowly nodding off to sleep the longer we were standing there. We also had photos of us standing around the balloon, and the film-maker went off with his video to have it duplicated so he could come back to the hotel in the evening and see how much money he could make out of us.

Finally, we all had to take part in a mock "balloon flyers ceremony", during which the pilots took great pleasure in throwing dust and sand all over us for no reason and making us recite bizarre oaths. This, I assume, is the highlight of their day. Afterwards, as though we hadn't already been humiliated enough, we had to perform the dirty task of deflating the balloon - something which involved a lot of rolling around in the dust trying to squeeze the air out with our bodies. By the time we had finished and got back on board the bus, most of us looked like human dust balls. Back on board, and presumably in order to make sure that none of us exploded spontaneously and strangled the pilots to death, we were all patted warmly on the back and told how much better we were than yesterday's crowd (these guys should be stand up comedians) and given certificates to prove that we had flown.

We picked up the rest of the group from the hotel and headed off for something called an Aboriginal Dreamtime Tour, which involved a lot of tramping around in the bush. At 8.30 this morning, normally the sort of time I would be thinking of getting out of bed back home, I found myself sitting out in the desert on a tiny deckchair, watching a group of Aborigines performing traditional dances for us while fifty million Australian flies converged simultaneously on my face. We had a local guide lead us through the outback, sitting down occasionally to either listen to suspicious sounding stories from Aborigine legend - usually involving giant snakes or people turning into mountains - or to watch demonstrations of painting or boomerang throwing by Aboriginal family groups who would suddenly appear out of the undergrowth on cue wearing virtually nothing and scaring the crap out of us. Eventually, we reached the actual living place of the Aboriginal family, in the middle of nowhere, and watched them perform an ancient ceremony before trying to flog us some paintings. We ended the tour with the delightful experience of watching an Aborigine cut a Witchetty Grub, a sort of big white caterpillar which they just pluck from the bark of a tree, and serve it up in little pieces for us to try. I couldn't quite stomach the idea of eating something which I had seen crawling around in a tree moments before, especially as it hadn't been cooked in any way, but I was assured by people with more iron constitutions who did that the grub just tasted a little bit like chicken.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.