Twenty Seven carriages and two locomotives on a fifty hour trans-continental roll. That was us on The Ghan last Wednesday to Friday from Darwin at the tropical top of Australia all the way down to Adelaide on the Southern Ocean.
Two days and change of steady rolling is ample time to demonstrate the continental scale of Australia, but emptying your head and just gazing out the picture window in rhythm with the rails gets you to the same realization. Torrid at the top, outside Darwin fierce heat fairly radiates from the almost jungly ground cover, and the road hugs the track for the better part of the day, like if the two were separated, one or the other just might not make it.
They break the trip with a stop at the town of Katherine. The Ghan puts on several excursions around Katherine for the four hour stop, or you can simply remain on board.
The main attraction out this way is the Katherine River Gorge, which is owned by the local Jawoyn Aboriginal people. As soon as they'd secured their legal native rights to the land they leased back management rights to the government, and now it's jointly managed with the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory.
Were it not for The Ghan, you'd need to make the (relatively) short hop 314 kilometres (195 miles) south from Darwin along the Stuart Highway to the town of Katherine, then a further 29 kilometers out to see the Gorge. Last Wednesday it was completely bloody still and furiously hot. It's an austere, stark kind of place, and beautiful nonetheless. See here, here and here.
Before dark, and once the Ghan lumbered off again it was time to convene for dinner. The Ghan is marketed as one of the world's great train journeys, but the food's not over-elaborately presented, which, to us, is good. One thing for Australians, there's not a stuffy one in the lot, and dress was full casual - totally unlike the ostentation found in luxury trains' dining cars all around the world.
Portions were generally smallish and safe - beef or chicken. There was the obligatory kangaroo steak, which doesn't taste like anything, much. It's lean and could have used a good, stiff curry. Over the course of several meals came two odd diversions into tarts (which, we suspected, was because they can be made ahead and reheated), and one of the two chefs attempted a little Middle East flair with felafel and lentils. I wondered if it was the one who talked to himself as he walked up and back from the crew quarters.
*****
Day two broke with the intrusive and unavoidable PA announcing an impossibly early first breakfast seating. Our cabin class enjoyed an en suite coffee or tea service, which was better.
Where HD TVs have an aspect ratio of 16:9, the cabins' big windows would be more like 26:9, a good two meters long and maybe just less than a meter high. Really luxurious and really, really nice.
They also did the nice trick of placing a window on the other side of the cabin facing the aisle, with blinds you could optionally retract for privacy. Gave you the option of keeping an eye out for scenery on both sides of the train, so if something caught your fancy on the other side you could move into the aisle to see it better.
Our class of service had en suite facilities, and I swear the shower was bigger than the one in our little weekend cabin. This was our third train with toilet facilities en suite - the others being the Blue Train from Pretoria to Cape Town and the E & O service from Singapore to Bangkok, and these facilities were without question and far and away the best.
I found cabin seating to be a little clunky. There was only the couch to sit on by day. Other trains put a chair on either side of the writing table below the window, but The Ghan didn't have one, which meant both passengers had to sit up on the couch all day.
Would have been better to have had a chair, so that if one of you wanted a nap, or just to stretch out a bit, the other could have moved to the chair and there'd have been room. We thought it might have been particularly uncomfortable for older folks to have had to sit stiffly on a couch all day.
During the dinner service, as usual, the cabin attendant made your bed, and in our case it was a full sized double, which obviously dominated the room, but which was clean, comfy and really very nice. Others complained of not being able to sleep when the train stopped and started during the night (to let freight trains pass) but once the rhythm of the rails had put me to sleep, I never heard a thing.
Late morning brought us to Alice Springs and a several hour stop. In the Red Centre, as they call it, Australia was desert, and much more like Africa than we would have guessed. The bird calls were African. The tall yellow grass and red soil north of Alice looked positively like photos like this one from the Namib-Naukluft park in Namibia - minus the sand dunes.
There were several excursions on offer and we joined one to the oldest cattle ranch in the area, the Undoolya Station, a 1200 square kilometer ranch which runs 5000 heads of poll Herefords. Our entirely affable host "Frosty" drove us to and from the ranch, which is about twenty minutes out of town, off the BITCH-a-men (which I surmise is Australian for bitumen, or paved) road.
Frosty regaled us with tales of the annual Henley on Todd Regatta, the town's biggest annual fund raiser. The Todd River, as we rolled over it, was entirely dry, and normally is except for a short period each year when all the year's rains come to Alice. The Regatta consists of bottomless boats held up by their sides while participants race to the finish line. That is, all except in 1993, when - wait for it.... it rained and the Regatta was cancelled because there was water in the river.
Sometime before dark we crossed the Northern Territory/South Australia border. At dusk the landscape was full desolation, and there was just nothing out there. It was all dry river beds, scrub brush and cattle ranches with only just the very occasional bull wandering around - and nothing else. Far off hills now and then. We speculated whether you could walk to them in a day. That far.
Still, this was the part of the route that had been complete for 80 years (go to The Ghan's web site and they hit you with these irritating "Celebrating 80 years" balloons that have to float across the screen before you can navigate further). The line from Alice to Darwin didn't go into service until just over five years ago. Total rail length is 2,979 kilometres (1850 miles). The name is derived from Afghan camel trains that covered the route before. Wild camels remain from that era, and are a nuisance for today's cattle ranchers.
*****
It's inevitable on one of these train rides that most of your fellow passengers are long since retired and a fairly doddering lot. We sought out the few others like us who weren't in that category and had a lounge car party on the second night. Course, it wasn't hard to outlast the Ghan's cane carrying clientele. But it was nice of our bartender to make a big show of closing the bar and leaving at 11:00, and then come quietly back, reopen and tell us funny train stories on into the night.
*****
On the final morning spotty rain alternated with brilliant sun. The long, low Flinders Ranges (all ranges in Australia are low) played out in north/south lines off to the east. This was wine country, north of Adelaide, and you'd be hard pressed at times to prove you weren't in Ireland.
That special sunlight that comes with higher latitudes had returned (see also here) and early crops on the farms were beginning to come in in brilliant spring green. Fresh wind off the sea and a little of winter's remaining chill greeted the Ghan at Adelaide station, two days, several climates and a continent apart from where we began.
(These photos are from EarthPhotos.com. See photos from across Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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