THE INDIAN PACIFIC - THE JOURNEY OF A LIFETME

Our next destination after Adelaide was Perth on the West coast of Australia. Perth is known as the most isolated city in the world and is closer to Beijing and Bali than it is to Sydney. We chose to let the train take the strain but not just any old train, but the famous Indian Pacific which runs from Sydney to Perth twice weekly, taking 4 days and 3 nights to cover the whole 2800 miles, crossing 3 different time zones. The Indian Pacific train is 700 metres long and about half way down the platform I started to ask Marc if we were nearly there yet. We boarded at Adelaide at 6.00pm on Thursday evening and would be travelling 1700 miles over 38 hours.

There are three travelling standards on board. Firstly Gold Kangaroo Luxury Sleeper Cabins i.e. “the attendant will draw your curtains, turn back your bed and warm your slippers as you are wined and dined in the Moonlight Dining Carriage. Then we have Red Kangaroo Sleeper Cabins i.e. “after you’ve scrubbed, moussed and oiled yourself with the free smellies in your private bathroom, retire to bed and awake refreshed for another day”. Finally, there is Red Kangaroo Day/Night Seater Class i.e. “here’s your seat for the next three days, no sleeping in the lounge car, no using the towels as blankets and no getting bladdered at any of the stopovers, stiff neck thrown in free”. Guess which one we were in? And yes, it was fantastic! Cattle Class is where you get to talk to and swap tips with people from all over the world. Our carriage had young families, backpackers and ‘grey nomads’ all taking the trip of a lifetime.

There were 10 Welsh people in our carriage alone, enough to have an eisteddfod, amongst them the backpacker from Pontardawe who obviously didn’t own any sort of pyjamas, but had taken heed of the Dress Code on board and had bought himself a sleek navy and purple dressing gown especially for the journey. He became known as Hugh Hefner.

The train takes 9 hours to cross the Nullarbor Plains – just mile after mile, hour after hour of nothing but red dust and bits of scrub as far as the eye can see. Somewhere across this vast wilderness, the train travels on the longest piece of straight track in the world – 300 miles without a curve. We had been advised that if we wanted to take a shower, then the best times were in the early hours of the morning or first thing in the morning before the water in the ‘cold’ water tank was heated to scalding point by the sun. Inside the train, the air conditioning made sure it was nice and cool, but the temperatures outside on the Nullarbor desert were in the 50’s!

I had read on the Internet that food was available on the train but we were welcome to take our own but just not eat it in the buffet car. Being skinflints, and taking previous British Rail experiences into account, we took our own food with us. We had prepared a cool bag crammed full of lovely cheese and biscuits, dips and crudities, fruit and muesli bars, and a packet of Tim Tams, which are a scrummy Aussie version of a Penguin, perfect with a cup of tea when smuggled into the buffet car!

We stopped to drop off provisions at a desert outpost called Cook (or as I’d read somewhere, it should be called Baked), population 7. We also changed train driver here but no one was sure how the new one had got there – was he already on the train or does the poor soul have to live in Cook, and of equal concern, what did they do with the old driver? Anyway, we were allowed 20 minutes to stretch a leg in the dust and derelict buildings of this once thriving ghost town where the words “Help Our Hospital – Get Sick” were painted on the side of a rusty old oil tank. We passed through a settlement called Forrest (hmmm) population 2. This must either be some form of penance or they get on like a house on fire. The train also stopped in the middle of nowhere where a guy was waiting in pick-up truck by the side of the track. He caught a big box that was flung off the train, chucked it in the pickup and drove off, who knows where.

At the end of the second day, we had a 3 hour stop at a town called Kalgoorlie, a thriving and prosperous gold mining town in the middle of the desert that produces 800,000 ounces of gold every year from the Superpit. Superpit is mined 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is expanding by the day. Eventually it will measure 4km long, 1.5km wide and go down to a depth of more than 500m – I just hope they got an EIA assessment done first. It will excavate the strip of land known as the Golden Mile where Paddy Hannan first discovered gold in Kalgoorlie in 1893. The Golden Mile has produced nearly 50,000,000 ounces of gold since the days of Hannan. We enjoyed a couple of drinks in a bar where the barmaid recognised our accents in a flash and told us that her dad came from Caerphilly. He had taken the family back last summer and they had spent hours driving up and down the road past the house where he was brought up. We saw a couple of fine examples of gold-diggers beards propping up the bar here too. One of the main attractions of the town are the ‘skimpies’ – scantily clad barmaids that start work at 10pm in some hotels and bars. I think that it’s more than a coincidence that all Indian Pacific passengers have to be back on the train by 10pm at the latest – they’ve probably lost a few in years gone by. ‘Houses of Ill Repute’ have been commonplace in Kalgoorlie since they struck gold here – whilst not legal, they are tolerated and one establishment has even diversified, offering daily tours around the 12 lavish and sumptuous themed rooms for a price, the most popular being the Boxing Ring Room and the English Haymeadow Room (why do I want to burst into a rendition of Roll Me Over in the Clover!)

Over the three days in the desert, we saw a caravan of seventeen camels, kangaroos dotted here and there, a family of emu’s, little white goaty things, vibrantly coloured birds and huge wedge-tailed eagles, the largest bird in Australia and the emblem of the Indian Pacific. At one point someone shouted “giraffe” – obviously been in the desert (or the lounge bar) too long.

At times, the journey seemed never ending, like at 3.00am when the floor looked to be a more inviting and comfy option than the reclining seat – but we both realise that we have been so lucky to be able to experience this trip of a lifetime.

And so we arrived in Perth on Saturday morning to the wonderful sight of Gwen, waiting on the platform, waving her little Red Dragon flag.