Alice Springs – July 30, 2025 (Author: J)
We arrived in Alice Springs in the wee hours of July 30 and went straight to bed. I awoke the next morning to a beautiful day. As usual, I was the first person up, so I went to the gym at our hotel: the Doubletree. Because the hotel wi-fi was spotty in the gym, I couldn’t do a strength training video as planned. Instead, I did some cardio and puttered around with the free weights. Fortunately, by the time I was done with my workout, everyone else was awake. We got dressed and walked to the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for breakfast.
If you are not familiar with Alice Springs, it is a town of about 30,000 located roughly in the center of Australia. The main part of town is to the west of the River Todd; both the Doubletree and the Botanic Gardens are to the east of the river. Oh, and the river usually doesn’t have any water in it.
As I mentioned, it was a lovely day, so we had a pleasant walk along the dry riverbed to the gardens. The Olive Pink Botanic Gardens (named for a woman called Olive, and not for two of my favorite colors) is a large garden featuring native dry-climate plants and some sculptures. It is also home to some rock wallabies, who made themselves scarce during our visit. Once in the gardens, we went directly to the Bean Tree Café for breakfast. The café has outdoor tables surrounded by red hills and garden plants. I got the sense that we were the only tourists there, mainly because the rest of the diners were teenagers in school uniforms.
P and I had the cinnamon toast (delicious) and D had eggs (always eggs). We also got some coffee drinks for the adults and a smoothie for P. The food and drinks were excellent, the atmosphere was relaxing, and the colorful garden birds were just the right amount moochie. (They hopped around where we could enjoy watching them without ever hopping onto our food). After breakfast, we had a wander around the garden and then forded the river to visit the main part of town.
Based upon my research, it seems like tourist numbers are down in Alice, and taxi operators are therefore few. That meant that we were limited to places we could reach on foot. We settled on visiting the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The RFDS provides medical services by airplane in remote areas of Australia. As Americans, we found it to be an interesting alternative to our system of providing no medical services in remote areas. The RFDS Visitor Centre has some historical exhibits, some planes you can climb on, a VR experience that simulates flying on one of the medical planes, and a gift shop full of stuffed koalas dressed as medical professionals. P took the kids’ scavenger hunt activity quite seriously, dutifully filling in the map of RFDS stations. The little booklet is still in the pocket of his fleece.
After visiting the RFDS, we walked back to the hotel for a late lunch. We hadn’t eaten any of our bus provisions the previous evening, so we made cheese sandwiches and ate them in our room. We spent the rest of the afternoon resting in our room. A little before 4 pm, we went downstairs to wait for our shuttle to the Kangaroo Sanctuary. While we were waiting for the bus, we saw an interesting animal run past the hotel. P followed at a safe distance and was able to get a photo. We think maybe it was a dingo.
The Kangaroo Sanctuary is what it sounds like. It is a place where orphaned kangaroos are fostered and released back into the wild. It is also home to a mob of kangaroos that cannot be released because they have physical limitations that would make them easy pickings for the dingoes. The sanctuary founder, Chris Barns (aka Brolga) was the star of a show called Kangaroo Dundee, which I had never seen. But the driver ran clips on the bus television while we drove out to the sanctuary.
If you like animals, or need your faith in humanity restored, or just want to watch the sunset in a peaceful location, the Kangaroo Sanctuary Sunset Tour is for you. I built our entire itinerary around being able to visit the sanctuary before boarding the Ghan (which means you need to be in Alice on a Wednesday and board the train on a Thursday). It was worth it. We spent about 2.5 hours walking around the property learning about Chris’s work and interacting with the baby kangaroos. They should be in mom’s pouch, so they enjoy being carried in pillowcases. Once the babies are older, they either join the mob hopping about the property or, if they can be released, they are sent to a separate area to be de-habituated to humans.
After the tour, I had booked dinner at Hanuman, an Indian/Thai restaurant conveniently located in the lobby of the Doubletree. I had noted on our reservation that we were celebrating our 20th anniversary, and they had glasses of sparkling wine waiting for us. We also went ahead and ordered some fancy cocktails. Hanuman has a nice selection of vegetarian dishes, as well as a number of meat items that can be made vegetarian. (They use tofu for the meat). We ordered a selection to share. Everything was delicious.
At the end of our meal, we ordered a slice of cake to share. Because it was our anniversary, the restaurant added a sparkler. Having grown up in a classier neighborhood than I did, P never had the experience of running around with lit fireworks. So, he didn’t realize that you cannot blow a sparkler out. He huffed, and he puffed, and then he dumped an entire glass of water on the cake. I decided to try it anyway.
“How is it?” P asked.
“A little too moist,” I replied.
P was not amused.
After dinner, we made the short walk upstairs to our room. It had been a relaxing day full of excellent food – overall my favorite day of the trip. To think that we only stopped in Alice to catch the Ghan.
In the next installment: we catch the Ghan.
Travel Monkeys 