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September 29, 2009 - Alice Springs Desert Park

By Melissa Markham on September 30, 2009 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today, we were up at 7:30, but moving a bit slowly. It was 9:30 by the time we showered and packed and walked to Lasseter Casino Hotel for breakfast. Then it was back to the room to finish packing, checking out and heading on.

We went to visit Alice Springs Desert Park. This was a spot recommended by both of our tour guides while we are in Alice Springs and since we had been able to rearrange our flights from a mind-numbing 12 hours of flying and layovers to a mere 1 1/2 hours of flying, we had time on our hands to go visit it.

The bad thing is that in the end, we only had a couple of hours to visit and we could have easily spent four hours in this botanical garden/aviary/zoo. While there, we saw and learned about beautiful and useful desert plants from the sandy regions, woodland regions, and river regions.

They have a plant called a Desert Rose which looks a lot like our Rose of Sharon back home.

Then they have a Dogwood that looks nothing like our Dogwood tree!

We saw numerous birds and a few kangaroos. Many of the birds have iridescent wings or brilliant plumage, but they were hard to catch in photographs.

The nocturnal house was enchanting and we wish we had had more time to watch the bilbys, various mice, wallabys, snakes, and other nocturnal creatures It was the best nocturnal exhibit I have ever seen.

Here are more pictures of our time at the Alice Springs Desert Park.

Next we were off to the airport. We had a late lunch and waited for our flight. The airport was small and once through security, you could go outside and sit on the terrace in a gated area. Quite lovely!

Our flight was only about 90 minutes long and still they served us a snack, soda, a meal and gave us mints before we got off of the plane (I hope the airlines back home are taking notice of this!).

Once we arrived, Daniel picked up our rental car and Jack and I loaded our luggage into a taxi. We couldn't fit it and all of us into the rental car. Daniel went by the grocery store with Katrina and Jack came with me. We are staying at On The Beach Apartments and like so many businesses here in Australia, they close early, so we had to get our keys and instructions out of the wall safe so we could get into our room. Our room ended up being in the building next door (Seashells). Jack and I unloaded from the taxi, with the help of our wonderful taxi driver (who was from Scotland, married to a Chinese woman and now lives in Cairns-you find a lot of this type of varied backgrounds here in Australia.) Then Jack started taking bags up to the room while I watched the remaining luggage and watched for Daniel and Katrina. Jack got upstairs, then came back and told me there was someone in our room...so I went up. Turns out there was a typo in the letter, but the inhabitants of room 6 were kind and helped us to figure out we should be in room 8! So then Jack lugged all of the luggage up to our room (this involved pulling them up stairs. Later, realized we could have gone in on the garage level and taken an elevator...oh well.. Builds muscles!

Then Jack and I waited outside for Daniel and Katrina to show up. I think we must have stood out there for about 30 minutes. They got turned around and a wee bit lost before making it to us. It was disconcerting to be somewhere that he couldn't call us and we couldn't call him and he didn't know which building or room we were in. But we got it all sorted out, and then picked our rooms. I began on the mountain of laundry (should have taken a photo). I was excited there was a dryer, but after a few clothes were in there for 3 hours and were wetter than when they went in, I gave up and we are using the drying racks and furniture and clothes hangers. Went to bed close to midnight.