Australia: Red Centre puts Alice in wonderland

You can lead a horse to water, and in Alice Springs you can also Ride a Camel to Dinner. That is the name of a popular evening out run by Frontier Camel Tours, which offers a “total camel experience”. An hour’s trek atop one of these strange beasts along the Todd River is followed by a visit to a camel museum and dinner with cured camel meat as a starter.

The arid, paprika-coloured desert of Australia’s Red Centre is the kind of environment to which camels are well suited. Since their introduction to the country in 1840, when they were brought over from Asia to transport goods across Australia’s vast central plains, these so-called ships of the desert have thrived. Today, there are reckoned to be more than half a million camels roaming wild in Australia. They are now so well established in the area that the Voyages Camel Cup – think the Derby but with camels – is a highlight on the Alice Springs calendar.

In a town like Alice, such bizarre events are commonplace. When I say clients can ride along the Todd River, I mean along the riverbed. The Todd is a sandy, dried-out tributary that rarely sees any water. When I visited in May, it had not flowed for more than 18 months. The locals are proud of this phenomenon and each year host the ironically named Henley-on-Todd Regatta, in which teams of ‘sailors’ run along the riverbed carrying bottomless boats. “It’s the only boat race in the world that’s cancelled if it rains,” I was told.

Slap bang in the centre of Australia, Alice Springs’ location (1,500 miles from both Darwin and Adelaide) was determined by the explorer John Stuart who, in 1871, decided that one of the 12 telegraph stations supporting a fledgling communications system across the desert should be built on that spot. The town was named after the wife of his boss, South Australia’s postmaster, General Charles Todd, who had to settle for having the waterless river as his namesake. Several gold rushes in later years helped the community grow into the largest in central Australia.

Today, most holidaymakers use it as a base from which to explore the wilderness and culture of the Red Centre and as a staging post en route to Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) 300 miles away.

There is an empty, transient feeling about Alice and once clients have looked around the aboriginal art shops and worked out that taking a didgeridoo back as hand luggage is impractical, they might be forgiven for thinking the town has little to offer.

But scratch the surface and there’s enough to do in and around the town to keep them busy for a couple of days.

For £8, you can buy an Alice Wanderer ticket that allows one day’s unlimited travel around the town, stopping off at all places of interest.

A trip to the old telegraph station gives an idea of how isolated the early pioneers were 130 years ago.

Hopeful faces stare back at you from old sepia photos while the restored buildings and old record books hint at how harsh conditions were. In fact, the first message sent out from the station was to inform the authorities that the new stationmaster had died of thirst in the desert on his way to taking up the new post.

A visit to the Flying Doctor Centre, where you can learn about the service, is another reminder of the Red Centre’s vastness.

Three doctors look after 16,000 people in the Outback – an area the size of Europe. The old 1970s soap opera about the Flying Doctor service was based on scenarios from real life, although I was firmly assured the doctors are far too busy to have a fling with any of the nurses.

If visitors only have time to visit one local sight, then the Alice Springs Desert Park, seven miles out of town, is a must.

This nature park, via its educational tour, shows how the desert’s delicate ecosystems work and how the aborigines scrape an existence in this seemingly barren landscape.

Several demonstrations are held throughout the day. At the aboriginal workshop, you can learn how to throw a spear, and the birds of prey show is breathtaking, with eagles and falcons swooping down to their handlers, seemingly from nowhere.

David Attenborough has visited the centre and wrote in the visitor’s book: “There is no zoo or wildlife park in the world that can match it.”

A trip to the Desert Park is included as a stop-off for clients taking the two-day transcontinental Ghan train journey from Darwin to Adelaide. The train is named after the Afghan camel herders who cared for the camels making the same journey across the red, parched ground before the age of rail.

In Alice Springs there’s no escaping the camels and no denying there’s no other landscape like this on Earth.