On May 29th, I had the first of a two free days in Alice Springs. After going on the Internet, Alex, Nina (the two German girls who were doing much of the same tour as me) and I went to the Royal Flying Doctors' Service with Andy, another guy on our tour.
Throughout the Outback there are people whose only link to medical services are by plane, some still up to two hours away. The Flying Doctors' basically acts like your GP and ambulance for thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to have access to a hospital. After a look around the museum there, we saw a short film on the role of the Service and then were taken to see the control room by a guide. The whole thing was pretty informative and well worth a look, since it's so different to our health system at home whose transport problems are tiny compared to what these guys have to deal with.
We went up to Anzac Hill that evening to see the sunset and then went out to a couple of bars after dinner to meet up with a few others from our tour.
The next day we went for a walk down the (dry) river to the Telegraph Station before heading to the School of the Air. As you can imagine, it's not practical for a lot of children to commute to school each day because of the immense distances in the Outback, so kids have to remote learn over radio and the Internet. You'd think that the quality of education would be less by learning like that, but they actually get some of the best school results in the country, probably because the pupils aren't distracted so much. Once they get to secondary school, they have to go to a boarding school, so they don't miss out completely on social skills and the like. We had a short tour all to ourselves, so got the chance to have a really good look around and ask any questions we liked. It was all fairly impressive and informative, much more so than I expected.
