We got up at six and left at 6:45 to return to East Point to try and catch the shore birds a full high tide at 7:15. We got to the beach just as the tide was turning and could actually see the water receding as we stood there because of the immense tide. But we got several new species of “peep” and terns before we had to leave at 8:30. Feathers Sanctuary has a checkout time of 10 AM; I had asked if we could extend it a bit, but they are going to be full tonight and couldn’t stretch it. RRZ wasn’t pleased as this a rather expensive place and he felt they could have juggled things a bit, but then he was already irritated by the outdoor shower with its mis-engineered floor that floods the entire bath/toilet/sink area, whereas I loved the whole idea of it…so we had quite different opinions of the place!
We cleared out our luggage and then relaxed by the pool in the cool shade for a while before driving a quarter mile down to the airport where we had a 1:50 flight to Alice Springs. The airport was air conditioned and had wifi so we spent a happy two hours checking email and finally sending off a couple of blogs.
Our 737 took off on time and we circled over Darwin at dead low tide and were amazed at how far the tide had gone out since we birded earlier. Whole bays were exposed. Quite amazing.
We flow over miles of scrub with the vegetation getting sparser and the soil getting redder until we reached the well-named Red Centre and landed in Alice Springs. We emerged from the plane into a wonderful dry warm desert! Very much like Tucson with similar vegetation, except no cactus. As we both love desert, we were thrilled! The town is quite small with a population of ~30,000. We got another Nissan X-Trail and easily found Nthaba B&B on the outskirts of town. We were greeted by Anne Cormack and shown our four-room cottage and invited over to the main house for wine. We had a very enjoyable white wine hour with her and her grandsons until her husband, Wil, appeared and he poured us some red! He was thrilled that we wanted to go out tomorrow, very early, to try and find the Bourke’s Parrot and asked if he could come along. Anne packed up a huge picnic breakfast and we’ll meet at 5:45 on Friday.
We drove downtown to have dinner at Oscar’s, but they were fully booked and we walked down the street and into QC, an fancy little bistro, where we split an excellent dinner of scallops with squid ink fettuccini and a steak with wild mushroom and Colombian potatoes. Great!
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