Nearly the whole population of Alice Springs would turn out for the boat race. And thousands of spectators would travel from all over Australia to this tiny town in the continent's red centre to witness the biggest event of the year.

The locals were almost at fever pitch. The weather conditions were superb. Last year for the first time in decades the regatta had to be cancelled. Rotten luck. It rained! Now you can't expect to have a boat race when there is water in the Todd River, can you? The boats, after all, have no bottoms. The teams would drown. I mean, how can you run through water? There are all classes of boat race on the Todd, but oars or sails would be a hindrance. The crews jump in, hold on to the sides of the boat with all their strength and run like hell through the sand and dust.

Yes, the weather was back to normal now, dry as a bone. Perfect.

Perfect for the crazy regatta, but surely you'd have to be a bit mad to live in this town of around 25,000.

It's smack bang in the middle of nowhere, the nearest cities being Darwin to the north, and Adelaide to the south - each about 1,500 kilometres away.

Then there's the weather. Too hot through the day, too cold at night. And the scenery. Climb to the top of Anzac Hill, the highest point in town (it only takes a few minutes) and you can see all around Alice. It's boring.

Sure, sunset and sunrise are delightful from here, but the eyes ache for a respite from this bleached, harsh terrain, the billiard table flatness which is broken only by the stark, bare MacDonnell range.

The lack of water deepens the air of depression. There is no reservoir to gaze at in Alice Springs, how could there be? They only get a few millimetres of rain each year.

They have to mine water here, bore through the desert. The town's supply is pumped up from a natural reservoir about 160 metres under the surface. How long will it last? Yet for all this, the town is booming. People are actually moving into this former staging post for the overland telegraph line. Indeed, the town was not even named Alice Springs until the early 1930s.

Until then it was known simply as Stuart, and before the Ghan railway was built to link it with Adelaide in 1929, supplies had to be brought in by camel for a population of around 250.

The reason for Alice Springs' expansion? One magic word. Tourism.

It is different, a totally new experience. It is isolated. A town like Alice is a frontier town, the in-place to be for the new age traveller. Alice Springs, like Timbuktu or Zanzibar, the words have an ethereal quality.

Now you can fly in using domestic links, but the airport is small, the flights infrequent, road distances phenomenal, the town centre tiny and high-rise buildings are somewhere on a future horizon.

And if you are prepared to spend a little time in and around Alice, there is much, much more than that bleak landscape.

Take that walk along the non-existent Todd River and yes, the sad legacy of the white intrusion into the Red Centre is all too evident. Aboriginals lying drunk, surrounded by beer cans, or puffing up clouds of dust as they stagger across the river bed to shelters made of branches and cardboard.

But book a half-or full-day trip into the desert and you will be entertained by proud aboriginals, still using the skills which have been passed down to them. Craftsmen will take not alcohol to their lips, but a didgeridoo they have just made, and test its sound quality. Playing one is far from easy.

And their women will take you out into the harsh terrain and teach you how to find all manner of natural desert foods.

Many explorers died from thirst and starvation in the early days of colonisation, not realising there was a harvest at their finger-tips.

Just out of town there is hot air ballooning at dawn, and a group of rail enthusiasts have restored old locomotives that used to make the long and often perilous journey to Adelaide.

You can travel a short stretch of the old line and even have dinner on board the old carriages as you trundle through the desert. The Ghan was named after the Afghanis who led camel trains through the desert in the old days.

Many of the camels were left to forage for themselves when the railway was built, and now there are said to be thousands running wild in the desert.

But camels are still bred in Alice - and exported to the Middle East because they are so highly prized for their strength and resilience! The Virginia Camel Farm will take you out camel-trekking the desert for either a day or several weeks, if you think you have the resilience to match.

A new aboriginal desert reserve in the West MacDonnell national park has been opened up to the public, and a permit can be quickly arranged to allow you to cover the Mereenie loop, a circuit of more than 700 kilometres, suitable for 4-wheel-drive vehicles.

The wilderness loop takes in King's Canyon, Australia's answer to the Grand Canyon, and the Henbury meteorite reserve, among the largest meteorite craters in the world.

I travelled through the first section of the West MacDonnell national park, to Glen Helen Gorge, about 150 kilometres from Alice, which is accessible to all vehicles, and no permit is required.

The road runs parallel to the MacDonnell range, and though the scenery is mostly monotonous, there are gems to be found by side-tracking towards the bare hills.

Like Standley Chasm, a nine-metre gap in the range, where visitors are dwarfed by the sheer walls of sandstone, and the Wallace rockhole where, if you look carefully, you will see rock wallabies scampering sure-footedly over towering rock faces.

Then there are the Ochre Pits near Ormiston Gorge, where you can run your hands over the rocks and then paint your arms with streaks of yellow and orange, as the aboriginals did here during their sacred ceremonies.

And of course, Glen Helen Gorge, spectacular, but barren, where in the old days white settlers tried in vain to raise cattle. There just wasn't enough grass.

For the masochists, a trekking route, the Larapinta trail, which cuts across the MacDonnells is almost complete. It will be about 100-kilometres long, I am told, pushed through with prison labour (for who would wield a spade voluntarily out there?).

And for the visitor who wants to forget about his barren surroundings, a wildlife park is about to be built just outside Alice at a cost of A$8 million (HK$48 million).

Of course, it will need to be irrigated, probably from the town's subterranean water supply. Much of the flora and fauna will have to be imported from areas of Australia with more favourable climates.

Mind you, it's amazing what irrigation can do. Would you believe that Alice has its own vineyards, and a quite reasonable selection of desert wines? Of course you would. It's just that crazy kind of town.