Alice Springs

Sand dunes, riverside woodland and scrub plains rebuilt as a park. The nocturnal house is kept dark by day so bilbies and desert rodents are active, and at the morning bird of prey show kites skim low overhead.

The base of the service that flies doctors to remote stations, still taking calls from patients by radio and phone. The exhibits hold old pedal-era radios and a full-size aircraft fuselage, while the planes that actually go out sit at the airport.

A school teaching children on cattle stations and in Aboriginal communities, first by radio and now online. From the visitor centre you watch through glass as a teacher takes a class over the screen, though lessons run only on weekdays in term.

Stone buildings put up in 1872 as a repeater on the north-south telegraph line mark where the town began. The Todd River waterhole beside them gave the town its name, though it was never a true source. A riverbed path leads there from the centre.

A small hill at the town's northern edge, showing the whole of Alice and Heavitree Gap breaking through the MacDonnell Ranges behind it. Crowds collect around sundown as the ranges redden, and it is a ten-minute climb on foot.

A cleft in the rock only a few metres wide, and only around noon, with the sun overhead, do both walls glow orange. An Aboriginal community owns and runs it, and the gate charges an entry fee.

Some twenty minutes' drive west of town, a waterhole sits in a break in the ranges. Black-footed rock-wallabies perch on the boulder slopes, blending with the stone, and they only show themselves if you watch quietly around dawn or as the afternoon fades.

A permanent waterhole lies under red cliffs and you can swim in it, but long shadows keep the water ice-cold even in summer. A walking loop over the rim looks down on the pool before coming back round.

A long trail from the Telegraph Station west along the ridges of the West MacDonnell Ranges. Walking the whole thing takes about two weeks, with water tanks at the sections, but people walk it only in the months when midday is cool.

The river crosses the town but is a dry sandbed most of the year. Once a year the Henley-on-Todd regatta has crews running bottomless boats over the sand, and heavy rain can fill it within hours, so never camp in the bed.

Galleries and museums around one courtyard, hung with many watercolours by Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte painter from this region. After his red ranges and white ghost gums, the view outside changes. An aviation museum fills an old hangar within the grounds.

Two clefts in the range a few minutes' drive east of town, sacred to the Eastern Arrernte people. On the rock wall at Emily Gap survive paintings of the caterpillar ancestor story. After rain you must wade a pool in the gap to reach them.

A deep waterhole pooled below red cliffs in the West MacDonnell Ranges, an hour-plus west of town. Long shade keeps the water startlingly cold even in midsummer. Swimming is allowed, but it is deep and icy, so no one lingers.

A desert plant garden the anthropologist Olive Pink began tending in 1956, across the Todd River. Central desert grasses and trees grow with name labels, a good primer before heading into the ranges. Rock wallabies sometimes come down near the garden cafe.