a very long blog about a very fun, but long train trip :)

Frankly, I didn’t take near enough photos. With all that time on my hands, what was I thinking NOT taking photos? So I’ve only got a few to show from the Indian Pacific.

Saturday morning I checked out of my hostel, gathered all my things and walked over to Sydney Central Station, but I had some time to kill before I boarded the train. So I had lunch at the Asian School Café (there are a TON of Asian school kids around, so it made sense) and I enjoyed a bit of Chinese food for lunch, as I people watched.

I was perusing over the official ticket I had gotten the day before, and noticed that something didn’t quite add up. For my seat assignment, it said, berth 1. That didn’t make much sense to me, why would they call it a berth, when it was a seat. The longer I looked at it the more it didn’t make any sense at all. Finally, I looked near the top of my ticket and it said “In Gold Service”, which means that I had been given a ticket, where I would have had my very own berth (compartment) in the train on the second highest class level. I had in my hand a ticket, worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars more than what I had already paid for my Red Service Day/Nighter seat.

Forget Gold Service, the ticket itself felt like gold in my hands, after sleeping with tons of strangers the previous four nights the idea that I might be able to have an entire compartment to myself for three days was almost intoxicating. My food would be free, I’d eat in a dining car with silver utensils and linen tablecloths, and I would have attendants who would cater to my needs the entire trip. Sigh. I held the ticket in my hand, took a picture of it. And decided to do the right thing, and own up to the fact that little old me was about 40 years too young to be able afford a ticket like that.

I showed the ticket to the ticket agent and explained that while Gold Service is, I am sure a wonderful service, it is not what I had paid for. She said that she had never seen anything like that happen before, and that it was very unusual. So she reprinted my ticket, and said, “Unfortunately, here is your ticket, in the Red Service Day/Nighter seats.”

See! Here's my proof! :)

However, unfortunate, my eye, I had tons more fun in Red Service, than I am sure I would have had in Gold.

The trip seemed to be broken into two parts, Sydney to Adelaide, and Adelaide to Perth, there were a small handful of people who were going the whole distance with me, including a girl from Perth (who I didn’t meet until the end of our trip), and an English family of five who had three girls between the ages of 7 and 15. Other than that each leg was utilized by two very different groups, and even had two very different groups of staff.

That first day in Sydney, there were two seated passenger cars, and one sleeper car for red service (I don’t know what was happening in Gold service however, because us lowly ‘red-service’ guests are not allowed to associate with Gold Service members … if they only knew ;) ). There weren’t very many people so we allowed ourselves to spread out, and it was great because I didn’t have to sit next anyone (score!). Watching the country side was beautiful in New South Wales (the state that Sydney is in, and where the train journey began).  Beautiful and charming farms with cows and sheep dotted the landscape, with an odd llama or two hanging out with a group of sheep (this I don’t quite understand, but it was fun to see them). The guy sitting behind me was from Adelaide and he was journeying back, and he kept telling me how much he preferred train travel to flying. As we continued to talk, he told me that I had missed an entire group of wild kangaroos that apparently were on the other side of the train I was looking from. He felt bad for me, so we spent the rest of the time trying to find me some wild kangaroos to see.

New South Wales

New South Wales

After a while he exclaimed, “Why are you hiding? There’s an American here!”

That I night I got ready for bed having not seen a thing. I gathered my toothbrush and soap and shampoo and headed for the showers closest to my seat in the car. It’s an awfully futuristic looking thing. You have to press a button to get it to open its large door, and press another button on the inside to get it to close; it feels very Star Trek-y.  Everyone had to make sure to press the lock button, because they had said that a major problem from the past had been people forgetting to press the lock button on the inside of the door, so then someone walks by and opens the bathroom … giving everyone quite the start and surprise (especially the poor soul taking a shower or going to the bathroom).

But no matter how cool and futuristic the door was, the inside consisted only of a combined toilet and shower, with just a plastic sheet to separate the two, no shower lip or anything, so the shower water would fall on the toilet itself. I felt like was pretty gross, but I needed to wash my hair and shave my legs, so I powered through. Yes, that’s right, you read that correctly, I shaved my legs on a moving train!

The water pressure was horrible, and water was getting absolutely everywhere, and I was cursing the design of this stupid bathroom, wondering why they couldn’t just separate the toilet from the shower, instead of having them be right on top of one another. And I tried to leave the bathroom looking okay, but I left it in my jammies leaving the bathroom looking rather drowned in water. The little English girls behind me complained about how wet the bathroom was, and ended up changing into their jammies underneath their sweatshirts in the main carriage – sorry girls!  (It was the next day I realized that the shower at the other end of the carriage was a separate bathroom and shower – doh! Haha)

The first night on the train was … interesting … the seats go back a luxuriously long way, but the only problem is that there isn’t anywhere to put your feet, so while your back is all comfortable your feet still hang down as if you were sitting. I learned pretty quickly to use the one piece of luggage that I didn’t check as a place to put my feet on, but that first night I hadn’t designed its placement very well, and slept terribly. I was grateful when I started to see soft pink in the sky, and knew that Broken Hill, our first stop, was getting  close.  

Broken Hill is a small little town on the edge of New South Wales, near the South Australia border (and is considered the Outback). And I had a chance to walk around the little town and get a feel for it.  I was even able to get some breakfast from the fast food chain, Hungry Jacks for much less than if I had gotten it on the train. For those who don’t know (I didn’t until recently) Hungry Jacks= Australia’s Burger King.

Sunrise in eastern New South Wales,
outside of Broken Hill

Indian Pacific Rail Track Plaque

It seemed like a sweet and homey town, seems like these two
enjoyed an Outback wedding :)

Please notice how breakfast is lovingly referred to as
"Brekky" - ah, gotta love the Aussies! :)

There we picked up a TON of people, and both seated carriages were filled to capacity. I groaned. Sleeping had been hard enough and I couldn’t imagine how I’d be able to do it with a funny sort of man who kept talking trying to maintain a very boring and dry conversation.  It was a little like trying to have a conversation with the teacher from Ferris Buhler’s Day Off.  Buhler. Buhler.

Luckily I had purchased a ticket to the lounge car, and after meeting Howard (who no matter how boring he was to listen drone on and on, was also very kind), I quickly found a nice little seat in there.

The background was changing considerably, our environment that had begun so green and verdant with creeks and pasture land, became home to red earth and sparse patches of green shrubs.  And it was here, crossing over into the state of South Australia, I saw my very first wild Kangaroo watching the train, as I watched her back, with her little joey seemingly jumping at her skirt. This land had no cows to watch, but they were replaced by tons of wild emus running in flocks of 6 or so.

We stopped in Adelaide in the afternoon, dropping off most passengers, and every staff member. I had planned to walk around Adelaide during the time we had, but unfortunately the Adelaide train station was quite a distance from Adelaide itself, so I got to see a lot of the suburbs around it, and the train station. Here I made a friend in Adam. He was from Sydney, and he was looking for mining work in Kalgoorlie, but he was showing up without having anything in place (sound familiar, haha). We sat and chatted about things, he was young, and I thought he might be 19, when he asked how old I was, he said, “Woah, I didn’t know that you were that old!” Haha, whatever. Also when he asked for my name he said, "Woah, that's a really American name!" I've met two Australians named Molly since I've been here ... Adam was sweet, but a bit of an odd duck, but then again we both do crazy things like move to places we've never even seen, just to see how things work out. We had a good long chat though about immigration policy in Arizona because he's dating someone, believe it or not, from Phoenix! Small world!  

I woke up the second morning to this:

Just in case you don't know, THIS is NOT what my feet usually
look like, I barely even fit my shoes! Note to self: Sleeping several nights in a
chair results in feet I shouldn't see until pregnancy! :)

That next morning when I awoke, we were solidly in the Nullabalor and some poor animal’s bleached white ribcage was a testament to that fact.  1 mile or 100, the red earth passed unchanged.



A particuarly verdant bit of the Nullabor



This is in the town of Cook, which I believe is in South Australia
just before we get to Western Australia

Cook, today, has a population of 4 people and 1 dog

Even with that small population, they have enough
to support a gift shop, where this bit of Cook
history is show cased

My last night on the train we stopped in Kalgoolrie (pronounced Kal-GOO-lee) and I had made some more friends, and all of us went out ‘on the town’ in Kalgoorlie. We were all about the same age, but it felt a bit like a UN committee meeting. One girl was from Australia, another girl was from Canada, I am (obviously) from the States, and the guys were from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. We were quite the mash up.

Walking around Kalgoorlie is like walking around an old Western ghost town. Many of the buildings were built in the late 1800’s, and each looks like their facades were constructed specifically for an old Spaghetti Western.

So, naturally our first stop was The Wild West Pub in Kalgoorlie.  It felt like I had stepped a bit back into the ‘yokel’ bits of the States, the music was Australian country (which included a lot songs about lonely truckers) the entire place was filled with almost exclusively men, many of whom were sporting mullets.

The Irishman apparently is really good at playing pool, and local after local lined up to play against him while we were there, and he told me that by the end of the night there was an entire little group watching him play. The Ozzie, Scotsman, and German didn’t end up sticking around to see this because one of the beautiful female bartenders started walking around from the bar passing around a clear glass jar that was quickly filling with bills.  I hadn’t noticed when I ordered my orange juice, but she was only wearing lingerie. We asked what the jar was for (I’m naïve enough, that I thought that it was for charity – ha!) But we learned that once the jar was filled, the bar tenders, called ‘skimpies’ start taking even more of their clothes off.

With this knowledge we left The Wild West Pub to the Irishman and the Canadian girl, and continued on our way. The night was still warm and we wondered the streets together laughing and making silly jokes. At one point in the night three of us took turns pronouncing things, the Australian, the Scotsman, and myself. And we’d laugh about how different our accents were. The German guy was just a little socially awkward and would laugh at odd times, but he laughed at all of MY jokes, so he was alright in my book.

The Indian Pacific, my home for three days

Another night on the train, my ankles were the size of elephant feet at that point … and by morning I was only a few hours away from Perth. I was worried that I’d be disappointed with Perth after having seen so much, and having anticipated so much. But as the train rolled past the ever greening scenery and the beautiful suburban homes east of the city, I knew that I had made the right choice.

The train inched to a stop in the East Perth Train Terminal, I grabbed my purse and my bag, and stepped off the train and onto the platform in Perth.