The Ghan

Surprisingly, given the early hours of the last few days, I slept until 7:30. Check out at 10. Washed my hair – again. You forget how unpleasant fag smoke is when you don’t have it around you. Dropped the camera. Bugger. Actually that’s not what I said. I said “Oh no, not again.” Or words to that effect.

I’ve never been a morning person. I had to meet with Judy and Rosie to return the boot, but I didn’t do that until 10 when we wandered into town and sat in the sun for a coffee. Recaffeinated, I then had to go and do a bit of shopping. Mainly to buy another pair of shoes as I couldn’t face wearing the ones I had on for a whole 24 hours. Not until they’d been washed! Then back to the hotel (no time to do anything else in Alice) to get my bags and walk the hot 10 minutes to the railway station which is a the back of an industrial estate.

Onto the “Legendary Ghan” as the train manager insisted on saying Every time she spoke to us. I get the message – and I hope that you’re embarrassed by the music that accompanies the information tape “Experience the legend that is...the Ghan.”

I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a train. It does an average of 60kph for 24 hours, with stops totalling about 3 hours to wait for freight trains to clear the single track sections (one of which was over 100 wagons long, with 4 locos). It travels through the desert, 10 hours of which are in darkness. It’s not Intercity.

I’ve probably got a slightly jaundiced view – I should have done the journey on the way up when I hadn’t spent 3 days driving through the outback. And it really was cattle class. The seats were airline recliners, and if you stepped beyond the “red kangaroo” class into the gold coaches, there was real trouble. The down side of having a lot of leg room is that with no foot rest you just slide off the seat. So my sleeping bag ended up as a foot rest instead of keeping me warm as I’d intended. Stupidly I’d also left my ear plugs in the bag that got checked in, and there was a babe that cried every hour, on the hour. I reckon I slept for about 20 min. The carriage shower was OK, though, and they supplied towels.

The food was BR c. 1990. (supplied by Qantas, I noticed). The prices were c 1990 too, to be fair, but still...

Anyway I got my diary right up to date, read a couple of books. Wore my iPod batteries out, that sort of thing. At least there was a lounge car so you didn’t have to sit in your seat for 24 hours. Thursday’s scenery was very similar (/ the same) as the last 3 days, as we went back south through the bottom of the Northern Territory and the sun set on flat earth. We were just north of Port Augusta as the sun came up over the Southern Flinders Mountains, and it is very noticeable how much drier the landscape is in SA – hardly any trees. The land in still flat but eventually gives way to fields of corn (very sparse fields of corn), then you’re riding past Parafield airport and in Adelaide.

There were 3 others from the tour on the train, all of them Japanese so I chatted to them for a bit, but there was quite a language barrier. The bloke next to me was from Rushden and I spent a bit of time talking to him and his friends.

Then I was waiting for baggage reclaim, then a taxi, and I was home. With several loads of washing to do I slept for about 40 minutes (which was a surprise given that someone was using a chainsaw outside the window), before getting ready to go out again.

Piccies may (or may not) follow when I get the film processed