Adelaide to Alice Springs
Adelaide is my favourite city in Australia, I have discovered. Everyone there is friendly. If I were to move to Australia, Adelaide would be top of my list for where to live.
While in Adelaide I had been staying at a hostel called Tequila Sunrise, in a 22-bed dorm. The beds were pods, with curtains across the front of each one for privacy, so it was better than a regular dorm room. One of the better things about this hostel was that it provides free breakfast and dinner! Most actual hotels don’t do that – I mean, breakfast if you’re lucky. And it was proper breakfast and dinner too. In the morning it was pancakes, cereals, bread, juice, fruit; and dinners were meals of pasta or chicken or whatever. With the bed being about NZ$48 and with two free meals a day I saved a lot of money there.
Nevertheless, after seven nights there I was ready to move! The hostel was really noisy most of the time. One of the things with hostels now is that the people staying in them are rarely backpackers or travellers – they are just foreign workers. They get up early in groups, making heaps of noise, put on their hi-viz vests and all head out (in waves, so group after group through the early morning) and then in the evening they are carousing to all hours. It gets a bit tiresome.
The dorm room at Tequila Sunrise - my bed is the one at bottom-right.
My next stop after Adelaide was Alice Springs, which was twenty hours away on a Greyhound bus. My bus from Melbourne to Adelaide had been eleven hours which was quite comfortable. That was with Firefly, using a V/Line bus. I wondered how similar or different the Greyhound bus would be.
The bus was leaving at 6pm. The hostel was just one street over from the bus station which was handy. There were only about ten people on board. A few got off en route and a few got on, but it was a pretty empty bus overall.
The passengers were divided between foreign tourists and Aborigine locals, and the first thing I noticed was that the locals were getting on the bus carrying big blankets. I thought it was a little odd, but quickly realised once we got under way that the interior of the bus was freezing. I’m used to this in southeast Asia where they set the air-con to Arctic, and people bring their gloves and scarves to ride the bus, but I hadn’t even thought this would be a thing in Australia. I had a sweatshirt with me but everything else was in my pack in the luggage hold. Even with the sweatshirt I was struggling not to die from hypothermia.
I was also surprised by the night temperatures outside the bus. We had the first break at a truck stop at Port Wakefield at 7.30pm, where Silver Gulls were wandering around in the dark hoping for food, and it was even colder than it had been inside the bus. More shocking than that was the price of Mars Bars in the shop there – AU$5.10!!
The temperature at Coober Pedy, at 5.30am, was like being in deep space. When I was but a boy, books often made mention of how in tropical places like rainforests and deserts it drops below freezing at night. I’m not sure how this started because obviously tropical rainforests don’t freeze overnight, but people back then didn’t have the internet so we just believed whatever books told us. Because I know rainforests are the same temperature day and night I didn’t think much about nights in the desert, but it really was unbelievably cold.
There had been very little wildlife seen along this bus ride. Most of the ride had initially been in the dark of course (although a Red Kangaroo had been seen on the road), and I was mostly asleep then, but even in the daylight hours there was almost nothing to be seen. A pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles were seen on a road-killed kangaroo just north of Coober Pedy, but not much else. No camels or kangaroos or bustards or emus.
The first daylight break was half an hour at Cadney Park, at 7.30am. I saw my first Yellow-throated Miners here, as well as a Pied Butcherbird (not my first).
Just before 11am the bus crossed into the Northern Territory, and at 11.45am there was another half-hour break at Erlunda where there were more Yellow-throated Miners and an Australian Raven. There were a surprising number of tourists at this one-building road-stop, although it turned out they were on tour buses rather than having all arrived coincidentally.
What also was very numerous here were the flies. The Outback and flies are synonymous but they don’t want your food, they want your sweat. You could be eating a smelly cheese sandwich or a rotting fish carcasse, and the flies will ignore that and zoom straight at your face. They are like the sweat bees in Asia, if anyone has had to deal with those – they are harmless but particularly like to go for your eyes for the moisture, and they drive you bonkers.
At 2.30pm the bus arrived in Alice Springs, where it was an unexpected 26 degrees. I’m staying at the Diplomat Hotel which is quite a lot more expensive than the Tequila Sunrise, but I was fairly done with dorms for the moment! The whole hotel is surrounded by metal spiked bars to keep out the undesirables. However, despite the town’s online reputation as being dangerous, so far (after two days) the atmosphere is nothing other than “regular country town”.
The Diplomat Hotel in Alice Springs:
Adelaide is my favourite city in Australia, I have discovered. Everyone there is friendly. If I were to move to Australia, Adelaide would be top of my list for where to live.
While in Adelaide I had been staying at a hostel called Tequila Sunrise, in a 22-bed dorm. The beds were pods, with curtains across the front of each one for privacy, so it was better than a regular dorm room. One of the better things about this hostel was that it provides free breakfast and dinner! Most actual hotels don’t do that – I mean, breakfast if you’re lucky. And it was proper breakfast and dinner too. In the morning it was pancakes, cereals, bread, juice, fruit; and dinners were meals of pasta or chicken or whatever. With the bed being about NZ$48 and with two free meals a day I saved a lot of money there.
Nevertheless, after seven nights there I was ready to move! The hostel was really noisy most of the time. One of the things with hostels now is that the people staying in them are rarely backpackers or travellers – they are just foreign workers. They get up early in groups, making heaps of noise, put on their hi-viz vests and all head out (in waves, so group after group through the early morning) and then in the evening they are carousing to all hours. It gets a bit tiresome.
The dorm room at Tequila Sunrise - my bed is the one at bottom-right.
My next stop after Adelaide was Alice Springs, which was twenty hours away on a Greyhound bus. My bus from Melbourne to Adelaide had been eleven hours which was quite comfortable. That was with Firefly, using a V/Line bus. I wondered how similar or different the Greyhound bus would be.
The bus was leaving at 6pm. The hostel was just one street over from the bus station which was handy. There were only about ten people on board. A few got off en route and a few got on, but it was a pretty empty bus overall.
The passengers were divided between foreign tourists and Aborigine locals, and the first thing I noticed was that the locals were getting on the bus carrying big blankets. I thought it was a little odd, but quickly realised once we got under way that the interior of the bus was freezing. I’m used to this in southeast Asia where they set the air-con to Arctic, and people bring their gloves and scarves to ride the bus, but I hadn’t even thought this would be a thing in Australia. I had a sweatshirt with me but everything else was in my pack in the luggage hold. Even with the sweatshirt I was struggling not to die from hypothermia.
I was also surprised by the night temperatures outside the bus. We had the first break at a truck stop at Port Wakefield at 7.30pm, where Silver Gulls were wandering around in the dark hoping for food, and it was even colder than it had been inside the bus. More shocking than that was the price of Mars Bars in the shop there – AU$5.10!!
The temperature at Coober Pedy, at 5.30am, was like being in deep space. When I was but a boy, books often made mention of how in tropical places like rainforests and deserts it drops below freezing at night. I’m not sure how this started because obviously tropical rainforests don’t freeze overnight, but people back then didn’t have the internet so we just believed whatever books told us. Because I know rainforests are the same temperature day and night I didn’t think much about nights in the desert, but it really was unbelievably cold.
There had been very little wildlife seen along this bus ride. Most of the ride had initially been in the dark of course (although a Red Kangaroo had been seen on the road), and I was mostly asleep then, but even in the daylight hours there was almost nothing to be seen. A pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles were seen on a road-killed kangaroo just north of Coober Pedy, but not much else. No camels or kangaroos or bustards or emus.
The first daylight break was half an hour at Cadney Park, at 7.30am. I saw my first Yellow-throated Miners here, as well as a Pied Butcherbird (not my first).
Just before 11am the bus crossed into the Northern Territory, and at 11.45am there was another half-hour break at Erlunda where there were more Yellow-throated Miners and an Australian Raven. There were a surprising number of tourists at this one-building road-stop, although it turned out they were on tour buses rather than having all arrived coincidentally.
What also was very numerous here were the flies. The Outback and flies are synonymous but they don’t want your food, they want your sweat. You could be eating a smelly cheese sandwich or a rotting fish carcasse, and the flies will ignore that and zoom straight at your face. They are like the sweat bees in Asia, if anyone has had to deal with those – they are harmless but particularly like to go for your eyes for the moisture, and they drive you bonkers.
At 2.30pm the bus arrived in Alice Springs, where it was an unexpected 26 degrees. I’m staying at the Diplomat Hotel which is quite a lot more expensive than the Tequila Sunrise, but I was fairly done with dorms for the moment! The whole hotel is surrounded by metal spiked bars to keep out the undesirables. However, despite the town’s online reputation as being dangerous, so far (after two days) the atmosphere is nothing other than “regular country town”.
The Diplomat Hotel in Alice Springs:
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I don't remember anything like this though our motel on each occassion was slightly more out of town the other side of the creek bed, though still within easy reach for anybody up to no good. We arrived there on the one day a year they hold camel races, it was great to see.
