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		Living Down Under - Outback & Co Page 4 / 11
		School, mail, shopping, police - continued
		Mail is delivered car or by plane. To cover the huge distances between the few communities and their mailboxes, Australians arranged several "mail tracks" and "mail runs". On the tracks, mail usually is delivered two or three times a week. The postman comes in with his "mail truck" to deliver letters, school books, presents, fresh food and the latest news(papers). Thus the postman is sort of a milkman and your messenger to the rest of the world, too. (He is also the one who will carry the birthday cake to your rich aunt.) One of his tracks can be up to 600 km long.       The "mail runs" are even longer (up to 1,200 km). Mail is delivered by airplane. People get their letters once a week. The pilot has to start and land his plane on one of the 168 unpaved runways up to 88 times during his tour. Passengers are only transported if there is some space left in the plane. The plane hangar in Alice Springs is situated right next to the Royal Flying Doctors.       Shopping in the outback very often turns out a day's trip. There are obviously not too many shops around (a matter of supply and demand) and you are likely to take a day off in order to visit your next supermarket. That is one of the reasons why postmen carry a lot of the fresh goods around the outback tracks. So watch your fridge and try to always have some yoghurt in stock.       Police officers are hard to find in the Australian outback. Between Oodnadatta, Harts Range and Alice Springs there is only one policeman, after all. Constable Mark Butler, the chief of the biggest one-man-district in the world, does the tour through his 100,000 square kilometer-district (1/4 of Germany) twice a week. And if he really gets to any problems (car crashs etc.) on his 800 km track, there is almost always a kangaroo to blame.
		Christoph Hage@ruhr-uni-bochum.de Last update: 26/03/02.