The Ghan part 2 and Adelaide

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The Ghan - part 2
Back in Alice Springs from the Uluru tour, I made the decision to go to the ‘Inception’ movie even though I was a little tired. Nat had warned me that the movie was a little dense - but I was unprepared for exactly what that added up to until about two hours into the film when the dream within a dream within a dream within a dream finally put me to sleep. Maybe I should see it again, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to help. ‘Inception’ might just be a big, doughy, ugly pile of nonsense masquerading as something thoughtful and intense.
With disappointment my unexpected companion, filled up with the ludicrously expensive barramundi from the neighboring restaurant, and picking my way gingerly through the isolated but menacing packs of drunken Aboriginal people haunting the empty shopping mall like zombies, I found a taxi back to the hotel. I stayed up late reconnecting and posting to the internet.
Sitting there typing as Midnight approached, I met one chap named Adam who was clearly an extremely troubled seventeen-year old. He had been whisked away by his Dad onto a huge Australia tour, I guess to get him away from his collapsing fortunes. I, actually, found him to be quite a pleasant and charming young man - but his horrid, violent exploits were clear antidotes to that impression: either he was lying, in which case he’s just a game-player, or he isn’t, in which case he’s a sociopath on his way to a long internment in the not too distant future. I excused myself as Midnight drew close - not because I was tired, but to quit while I was still ahead with this disturbed young man.
The Ghan wasn’t leaving until Midday on Thursday, so I had an ocean of time to kill: a nice lie in, a few jobs to accomplish, and a nice chilled out train ride to come.
Excellent Smithers!
I did indeed sleep in until the ungodly hour of 7:25am! My new neighbors turned out to be an older French couple with whom I swopped pleasantries. Eventually I met some people to share the taxi with, and took a walk into town where I accomplished every job except one. The one left over job revealed the true dinosaur nature I’m slipping towards. It seemed so simple: my poor black baseball cap after the last visit to the washing machine has finally given up the ghost. The fabric across the bill has frayed, torn, and is now peeling away in a most unseemly and hobo-making fashion. I look terrible when I wear it, and there is irritating fabric threads dangling in front of my eyes. It’s time to replace it. Simple enough you would think, right? All I ask is for a plain black baseball hat with no logos on. If I’m going to advertise for some company, I expect them to be willing to pay me. Otherwise, I want it plain. Sounds reasonable enough, don’t you think? Well, I searched every shop in Alice Springs (there are far more of them than you might, perhaps, suspect) and could I find one? Could I hell! I stand more chance of finding the Queen dressed in a red, rubber bondage suit dancing the ‘Can Can’ in Alice Springs shopping mall than finding a simple bloody hat. Grr. All the shop-keepers like to rub it in - ‘all the people really want the logos these days.
These days! Bah humbug.
So down to the Ghan I go wearing my ratty, tatty hat and load back into the Red section. Coming home again! My seat was better this time, it reclined further. What’s more, there is to be no-one sitting next to me!
Yeh babay.
Soon I am in conversation with Gary and Gaye the gray haired Ozzie couple opposite. Gary looks like a dead ringer for my old 1970’s pop-favorite (that most people have never heard of despite forty odd records) Peter Hammill. Soon I am wandering around and find out that there are only five people in the entire ‘S carriage’ next door to ours. Soon I am in there with my big wolf nose sniffing the air for an opportunity. I meet with my soon-to-be companions for the rest of the trip, Rhodda and train driver Grant and, opposite them, Di.
Soon the chairs have been swiveled and I have a four-seater area all to myself. It is luxuriant and definitely better than if I had paid for an upgrade. We are all pigs in shit, realizing our luck and enjoying the fact that we were in here before anyone else had thought of it. The only membership requirement for our ‘Section S’ secret club was that you couldn’t be a snorer. Very laudable requirement, in my opinion. If I had my way, I’d throw the bloody snorers off the train to be eaten by the desert dwelling man-eating kangas, wallabies, camels and such. I know that seems extreme, but after all the sleep lost to these greedy, selfish, grunting bastards, (even if they don’t know they do it) I can’t help but be a bit irascible about their filthy habit!
There’s a lot less drinking on this section. The lounge area is pretty dead. Instead we have lovely, friendly chats all evening long until the lights go out in the carriage at 10:00pm and the true wondrousness of our wolfish steal becomes apparent: It’s like sleeping in a double bed! Aside from being woken at 2:00am when the train, by common consensus, ate a camel, the clattering spray of gravel and the colossal, scraping bangs against the side of the carriage awoke us all from deep sleep, and I was not alone in thinking we had been derailed. Turned out it was a camel that had been chewed up and spat out by the train. Apparently, the crew says that the train swats kangaroos and wallabies like flies on a windshield - only larger animals make any kind of impact impression at all! Messy!
Other than that, we eat a leisurely meat-based breakfast to start the new day and we watched as the desert scrub seemingly instantaneously became transformed into rolling green hills and farm land covered in yellow flowers that, while pretty, are in fact some form of blight.
Soon we see a hillside with a giant bite-wound taken out of its side, and we are informed that it is the fabled City of Churches, Adelaide. The train shunts past closed prisons and urban graffiti-filled scenes and soon we are clambering off the Ghan, our adventure finally at an end.
Once again I had met and enjoyed some lovely people on the train. Dianne, her friends Josie and I took a taxi to the airport together, where I ended up dropping off my bags at the check-in for the flight to Sydney. I headed off back into the city for a hyper-real super tourist three hour walk, which incorporated the main city streets, the botanical gardens, the main mall street and a slightly odd ghostly feeling from knowing that I would be flying out of here in three hours to the big, big city and that all the people I was seeing were made even more wispy and unsubstantial by that fact. Adelaide clearly deserved more than the whistle-stop tour I subjected it to. Every one of the numerous Taxi drivers I hired was from Punjab. Every one of them claimed Adelaide as a magnificent place to live.
It certainly looked nice, but after three hours, my time was up and back to the airport I went to wait for my plane to the big City, Sydney, and my meeting with my brother for our final action-packed weekend together in Oz!
See you on the flypaper!

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