Another late start allowed us a lie-in. John and David decided to hire bikes and ride “to the middle of nowhere and back again”. But with a guidebook full of places to go, I decided to visit the Old Ghan Train Museum.

The Gahn was named after the Afghan Cameleers who preceded it as a means to transport goods to the red centre. The original Ghan was a mixture of narrow and standard gauge track, and stopped short of Alice Springs, which at least left the cameleers with something to do, but the train itself was notorious – it was said that if the train was due in on a Tuesday, and it arrived sometime on the Tuesday, then it was on time. In fact, even by this fairly generous standard it was often late, due to flooding of the track and mechanical problems. These days, the modern Ghan uses an all-standard gauge track that was built from scratch, and takes just over one day to make the trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs where it took over 10 days before. At the time the original track was built, there were plans to extend it to Darwin, but these have never been acted upon.

The museum is about 10km out of town, which is probably a “generous stroll” to an Alice Springs resident, but definitely well out of my range. I opted for the Alice Wanderer, which is a bus service that tours all of the major Alice sights on a 70-minute cycle. I was virtually the only person there, apart from an uninterested ticket-seller who cautioned me to “watch out for trains”. This warning was clearly unnecessary. The trains probably can move, but they weren’t doing much of anything at the time. The museum was however, excellent, and I was able to freely wander through the old Ghan carriages, which was nice – I half expected the entire thing to be in a whacking great glass box liberally sprinkled with ‘do not touch’ labels.

Next to the train museum is another monument to transport of years gone by, this time of the road-borne variety. This was nowhere near as good as the train museum, and except for a few placards here and there, was basically a warehouse full of old cars and trucks. I can imagine a truck enthusiast walking through here in absolute awe and saying things like “Isn’t that a Model C Ford 1942 mark 4 V2 486 with the brass radiator guard and full leather interior – why yes it is”, and then jumping up and down in sheer joy. I, on the other hand, was saying things like “Oh look it’s a truck – and that one’s a slightly smaller truck” and so on. In fact, I did learn one useful thing from the collection, and that was how road trains work.

A road train, which seems to be a uniquely Australian concept, involves taking a big truck, and hooking it up to more than one trailer – in fact, there can be quite a lot hauled by a single engine. The clever bit is that each trailer will follow exactly in the path of the one in front of it, which ensures that the trailers will not try to cut corners.

From the transport museums I re-boarded my bus (it had done another loop around the town in the meantime) and headed for the School of the Air. This was definitely the best display I had seen today – there was a very informative and professional video, and the staff were friendly and helpful. The School of the Air is not a flying school as many think, but actually a way of educating children who live in remote places scattered throughout the Australian outback. They communicate with the teacher via two-way radio and the internet, but the course is otherwise a fairly standard correspondence course. The combination seems to work very well.

I finished my tour with a quick photo-stop at the top of Anzac Hill, where the driver of my bus told me about the Todd River Henley Regatta. As I mentioned before, the Todd River has no water in it. This is how it works: get a boat and a crew, remove the bottom of the boat, then get everyone in it, walk out into the middle of the river bed, and race Flintstones-style down the river. Last year it apparently had to be postponed because there was water in the river.

These Australians are mad.