After having spent some time in The Alice now I am getting to know more and more locals, which is incredibly refreshing and inspiring. An amazing array of wonderful people with mind boggling stories. Film makers, editors, cameleers, ecologists with bush food knowledge, ex-tour guides, teachers, a chaplain slash rock music band member, hippie, handyman, farmer, land manager remote fire management - it's really hard to pin-point those people down just on their profession because they have done so many things! I had been house sitting and staying at a house where many of the house-owner's colleagues and friends and acquaintances found a room for a while whilst in town. Many of those sometimes preferred to sleep under the stars in the yard. In their own swag. A swag is a ready made bed which consists out of a mattress with a sheet and blanket, all covered by a canvass sleeve with zips. The whole lot gets rolled up when travelling and simply rolled out in the sand for the night. Campfire, camp oven, something to eat, to drink: done. Where on earth do you find guests that are all travelling with their own mattress and more than happy to sleep in your back yard! Why the house you say... Well, houses have showers. A washing machine. And when it's hot, houses can be cool. Accommodation in Alice can be rather expensive so many people rent and share houses. Interesting to see how 30 - 70 year olds share houses like students.... Dishes piled up to the ceiling, vacuum cleaners could be somewhere but no-one knows where they were... As I said: refreshing. Everyone shares a common theme. Love of remoteness and an intrigue of what's happening with the aborigines around here. The discussions are without single solutions. The longer you are here, the less answers you have.
