Alice Springs and an evening in Perth (2025)
To get back to Perth from Uluru, we had to drive to Alice Springs because there were no direct flights from Uluru airport. We didn’t have much time to explore the other parts of the outback on the drive to Alice Springs, but we did make a stop at Erldunda Roadhouse to get lunch. The people there were friendly, and the burgers we got were pretty good. We forgot to order fries with our burgers, but the person taking our order came over with a basket of fries saying that they cooked up an extra order and didn’t want to let it go to waste, so they kindly gave them to us.
On their property, they also have a emu enclosure, so before we left, we headed over there to say hi to them. Inside the store, you can buy food to feed to the emus, and it’s very clear that they know that anyone who walks into the enclosure usually gives them food. Unfortunately, we had none for them, but they still came over to us, so we attempted to take a photo with them without getting our phones pecked out of our hands.
After another couple of hours, we made it to Alice Springs and checked into our hotel. We still had a few hours of sunlight, so we drove over to Olive Pink Botanic Garden to take a short hike up Meyers Hill for a view of the city. The moment we got out of the car, we immediately saw a wallaby wandering around the grounds:
The garden is home to many wild wallabies, and we saw a few more during our hike up Meyers Hill. It’s a short hike up the hill, and not extremely difficult since there are stairs and clearly marked paths to take you up to the top. But at the summit, we got some great views of Alice Springs below with, of course, wallabies chilling out on the rocks:
We needed to get back down the hill so that we could leave before they shut the gate at the entrance, but we still enjoyed our short visit to the garden. We found a cute Thai restaurant for dinner, and then went to bed so that we could be rested for our trip to Perth the next day.
Our flight was scheduled for 11:30 in the morning, and we knew that Alice Springs Airport is small, so we got there like two hours before departure. However, once we arrived, I looked up at the departures screen and saw that our flight was delayed until 3:30. We were flying on Airnorth, and they don’t really do flight status, and even Flight Aware and other flight tracking sites didn’t show the flight being delayed. Since there was no easy way to track the flight if we left the airport, we decided to stay at the airport and wait for our flight. Fortunately with my Oneworld Emerald status, we were able to spend that time in the Qantas lounge, which made it a bit more comfortable for us.
At some point before our flight was about to board, I looked at the departure screen (there were only like 4 flights on there), and noticed that our flight to Perth was gone. After a bit of mild panic, Nick was able to find someone and asked them if they knew what happened to our flight. She actually went to find the Airnorth agent and then came back to us and said that the flight basically timed out of the departure screen, but that the flight was still scheduled to depart. We and the others on the flight were very relieved, and soon after, our flight arrived and we left for our 3 hour flight to Perth.
We didn’t expect to spend pretty much the entire day in Alice Springs airport, so when we got to our hotel in Perth, we were upgraded to an awesome room with a wonderful view of the city:
Dinner that night, which was also Valentine’s Day, was at Papi Katsu, a Japanese restaurant that looked cool. Unfortunately because it was Valentine’s Day, it was insanely crowded. It took a few minutes for us to check in for our reservation, and a few more minutes for us to be seated. Eventually, we were shown to our seats at the end of a communal table. Everything on the menu looked good, but we noticed they had an omakase option, called "Feed Me Papi” so we decided to go with that. Once we told our server that we wanted to do that, she replied “OMG, thank you for being so easy.” We could tell with all the servers running around that it was essentially chaos everywhere, so our server seemed to appreciate that we weren’t ordering a bunch of specific items.
And then I noticed that she was working a completely different area from us, so the next time she came over to check up on us, I asked her if she’s working our area and the one that’s on the other side of the floor. She said that the night before, the restaurant asked another server to work two shifts and she quit that day, so our current server was covering for the one who just quit, which understandably explains why she was rushing to check up on waaaaay more tables than could reasonably be handled by one person.
With the exception of one our dishes, our food arrived in a timely manner. The couple next to us appeared to have been waiting a while for their last dish, so we were basically happy that our food didn’t take an hour to show up. Our server came back to check up on us again, and she said that if we’re getting our food, then she’s happy (and so were we). I told her not to worry about us because we’ll get our food when it comes, and we weren’t in a rush to go anywhere, so she could focus on the other tables in case they needed her attention. At one point as she was taking our second drink order, she was furiously tapping away on her mobile ordering device, and I told her “you’re doing great!” She was thankful and told us that it’s been a crazy night, which was very obvious.
Anyway, the food was quite good:
Towards the end of our dinner, a significant number of tables had left and it started to quiet down in the restaurant. Our server was now just cleaning up tables, and came over to check up on us again, so we chatted a bit now that she had a break. First of all, she didn’t really notice that we weren’t from Australia, so when we told her we were from Seattle, she was surprised because, as far as we could tell, everyone there were locals. And then we talked about how we hadn’t gone out to dinner for Valentine’s Day in years and forgot that it’s a generally crazy evening for restaurants. She said that it’s their first Valentine’s service because they’ve only been open for eight months. She also said that she was happy that we got all of our food because because some guests didn’t even get their food creating some angst in the kitchen. I guess it was even more chaotic before we arrived, but hopefully they’ll have learned how to handle future Valentine’s Day services. Before we paid our bill, our server came over and gave me one of their paper fans that they used as table decor (I sort of joked to her that I wanted to take one home). She was awesome and despite the frenzy of it being Valentine’s Day, the food was good and we enjoyed our time there.
We walked back to the hotel and got some sleep because we needed to wake up fairly early for our visit to Rottnest Island!