Alice Springs

15th of May
This place is vast.
Today I had to get to the nearest civilisation, Alice Springs.
Though a tiny distance on the map this is a 5 hour drive away.
The bus prices being astronomical I decided to give hitching a go.
So it was a hike out to the entrance road of "the resort" which having been built so spread out had its own shuttle bus to get around.
Then I made a little sign and waited, sure I had half the day to wait for the bus anyway. I got a lift a paid the petrol costs.
This was a bit of a roadkill wildlife tour with kangaroo carcases every so often with crows or eagle feeding on them. One eagle nearly droped a leg through our windscreen but just missed. The size of the farms or "cattle stations" are vast. You pass a boundry fence every 44km. Some of the stations were overgrazed, in general there are alot more trees then you would imagine for a place where 9 months without rain is not unusual, rain once a month is alot, and the rivers flowing once a year is alot.
The map of Australia looks a bit like the imaginary ones I used to make as a kid with vast squares for arbitrary funny reasons. Like in south australia there is a huge Germany sized square for missile testing and an Ireland sized bit of which is radioactive from the British nuclear testing in the sixties.
In the middle there are lots of big Aboriginal lands square, but the good bits at the edges don't seem to have much of these. Tourists need permits to visit comunities in these Aboriginal areas to prevent pointless gawping.