Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.

Camels are wonderful animals. Witty, intelligent and sensitive.

Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it.

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

Yosemite Valley is like a tourist zoo. It's shameful.

If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.