Alice Springs is the hub of the 'red center' the Australian outback. It's a town of about 25000 including about 6000 aborigines and provides medical and educational services to the isolated communities and stations in the thousands of square miles of the outback.

Alice, as it's known, is also the center for aborigine art with literally dozens of galleries and artist studios. Because we were here on a weekend we were not able to visit the studios but we did manage to go through many of the galleries and talk to some of the street artists.

The art itself was very interesting with each painting telling a story using traditional patterns handed down over the generations. The original aborigine color palette was limited to reds, yellows browns and black by the pigments available in nature. Modern aborigine artists, while still telling the traditional stories using the traditional patterns, are using acrylic paints which make a lot more colors available.

There is also a wide variety in the quality of the art ranging from paintings that were dashed off to sell to tourists to works that took hours or even days of meticulous work to complete. There was also a variety of jewerlry, glass, ceramics and clothing made by local artists both aboriginal and not.

Alice is hot (100 degrees +) and dry and unless you're a camel you carry lots of water. Everything is very laid back and the people, as in most of Australia, are very friendly and helpful. The food is not great but the portions are enormous . Laura and I ended up sharing most meals.