Alice Springs Desert Park

Listening to the audio tour at the Desert Park

The closest we got to a Thorny Devil was unfortunately in captivity (but he's cool isn't he)

It always takes us longer to do things in a town than we think – we had quite a few plans for today and didn’t get half of them done. It doesn’t help that we’re still getting up on WA time I guess (1 ½ hrs later), which wouldn’t be a problem except for fitting in with business hours of places we need to visit. Anyway we enjoyed going to the caravan park’s Tavern last night for their Sunday roast special, and are going to splurge again tonight and go for pizza, which is something we really miss.

We spent most of today at the Alice Springs Desert Park which is a great place. They have quite a few talks so we went to one on Aboriginal methods of survival in the desert (mostly about finding water and gathering food), and then wandered around listening to their audio tour, which had lots of nice small bite sized (kid friendly) pieces of information about desert plants and animals. I love an audio tour because the kids are more likely to listen and take it in than if we’re telling them or even if a ranger is telling them (I guess because they can have little breaks). We were there a good 3 ½ hours anyway so it was great.

We’ve decided to move Uluru one day earlier and go tomorrow, and then a night or two in the West McDonnell Ranges on the way back – I think I didn’t properly research this area beforehand and didn’t allow enough time, so we’ll be trying to squash things in a bit which is a pity. I tried to see if we could cut back on travelling time anywhere, but the distances are just so huge that there’s no real way to reduce them. At least we’re on tarmac for quite a while now which will make it quicker and easier.