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Published: November 21st 2009
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The Indian Pacific railway, our ticket to Adelaide. Sunday was a big day for us, the beginning of our train trip from Perth to Adelaide! We took the Indian Pacific, a rather iconic Australian railway (similar to the Ghan, which goes up the centre of Australia to Darwin). Our seats were daynighter seats, in the Red class. We had heard unfavourable things about taking the train, but much to our surprise, it was quite comfortable. There was more room than the Greyhound bus (which we had done several 24 hour trips before) and you could freely walk around the car. As an added bonus, there were plenty of free seats, so Hillary and I got to sit across from each other and spread out over two seats!
That night we stopped in Kalgoorie for a couple of hours. Not much to do at midnight, but the train needed to refuel. This was our last stop before entering South Australia (still a ways aaway), but we noticed the quarantine bins again. Must be difficult keeping food from crossing the border. Unfortunately it just doesn’t always seem like the obvious thing, especially to tourists like ourselves.
Our next stop was Cook (in SA), which was well along the Nullarbor
Class
Hill and I chose the Red class. Gold was a bit out of our price range. Plain. This little town has a population of 4 or 5 people. It used to be bigger, but it’s become a ghost town over the years. We got to check out the abandoned school, jail and houses while the train’s fresh water supply was refilled. The only people who live there basically run the souvenir shop for the train (which stops a few times a week).
Every once in awhile one of our train attendants would get on the intercom and talk a bit about where we were. After leaving Cook, one joked if we had noticed that we were now gradually turning to the right, because we had just completed the world’s longest stretch of railroad in the world, 477km.
Train life was quite enjoyable actually. For someone like me who gets nauseous all the time on buses, the train was perfect. The motion didn’t bother me at all. Hill of course hasn’t had any issues with motion sickness at all during our entire trip. In fact she usually does a lot of reading during this time (buses or train, which the thought itself tends to make me dizzy). Also, the food was decent. Not amazing, but
Layout
Not a huge amount of space, but more than the bus we'd gotten so used to. it was nice to be able to get up and go over to the food car and find something to eat whenever you were ready. For the most part it was pretty quiet on the train. It gave us a good chance to catch up on some podcasts, and listen to plenty of music. Hillary also had the new Professor Layton video game to keep her busy, so she spent a lot of time working away on brain teasers. As for the actual car, there were showers available, but neither Hill nor I felt that we were that desperate over a simple two day trip.
By Tuesday morning, we had finally arrived in Adelaide. When you look at a map, it’s actually amazing how much distance we covered. Not to mention we were now almost at the South Australia / Victoria border! But we were happy to have done it by train, rather than fly. We had gotten from Sydney to Perth by bus. It would have seemed like a shame to take a short cut like flying this far into the game and miss the experience that is the Aussie railway (especially since we had missed out on
Scenery
Plenty of great scenery along the way. the Ghan from Alice Springs to Darwin).
Kevin (and Hillary)
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