Alice Springs Travel Guide

Introduction

462km (286 miles) NE of Uluru (Ayers Rock); 1,491km (924 miles) S of Darwin; 1,544km (957 miles) N of Adelaide; 2,954km (1,831 miles) NW of Sydney

"The Alice," as Australians fondly call it, is the unofficial capital of the Red Centre. In the early 1870s, a handful of telegraph-station workers struggled nearly 1,600km (992 miles) north from Adelaide through the desert to settle by a small spring in what must have seemed like the ends of the earth. Alice Springs, as the place was called, was just a few huts around a repeater station on the ambitious telegraph line that was to link Adelaide with Darwin and the rest of the world.

Today Alice Springs is home to 27,000 people, with supermarkets, banks, and the odd nightclub. It's a friendly, rambling, unsophisticated place. No matter what direction you come from, you will fly for hours over a vast, flat landscape to get here. On arrival, you will see that in fact it is close to a low, dramatic range of rippling red mountains,...