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Published: July 28th 2010
With the excellent trip to Kakadu still reverberating around me along with the beer from last night, I got up and made my way past the deeply helpful Italian lesbian working the desk who had helped me figure out how to get the alarm working on Antony’s phone, as well as lending me a sleeping bag and towel for Kakadu, out onto pre-dawn Darwin’s streets to the Greyhound station where a typically chaotic travel scene slowly bubbled up. A bus for Broome in Western Australia came and went. Airport shuttles came and went. People were gathering. An older lady came out and started innocuously selling something: turned out to be the ticket for the shuttle to the railway station. I got on the shuttle bus ignoring the whole check-your-baggage scene the driver was prattling on about: if your bag is more than twenty kilos, you’ll be re-packing into two bags, re-checking, etc. I tuned him out and watched all the people milling around. A very pretty woman clambered on board and sat next to me and we started to chat.
I don’t know what it is about French girls, but every trip I go on I find myself becoming close
to at least one! This one, Emilie, is from Brittany, but she lives on Reunion island, near Mauritius and Madagascar, and, like me, is a primary school teacher. By the time we arrive at the railway station forty minutes out of Darwin, have stopped to look back at the city perched on the horizon, dealt with the very calm and civilized checking in scene at the station, and marveled at the epic length of the Ghan train as well as taking snaps of its grey magnificence and loaded ourselves into the cheap seats in the so-called Red Section, Emilie and I found that we were sitting across the aisle from one another. My seatmate was a yank! Larry is a retired, liberal, ex-army blood specialist going back to where he had once been as a boy: Townsville! We have a wide ranging and pleasant conversation. We’re all settled in and excited. All the pre-boarding hoo-ha has evaporated: the sterile robot woman announcer has told non-passengers to exit, the staff has been told to, ‘cross check and lock all doors’, we’ve met John the train angel, I mean, the train manager. There’s a faint judder, and we’re off!
It’s brilliantly
exciting. I do love a long train ride. I’ve been on loads of them, and, except for the Trans Siberian that still waits my attention, I’ve done many of the World’s finest journeys. I love them! I love all the people you meet, the staying up late drinking and laughing, the bad food, the rolling scenery, the gentle rolling hiss that the more expensive trains make, the way the seats never recline properly, the surreal way that over-night travel nestles into your experience in a hallucinatory whirl. Fantastic experience every time, and ‘part one’ of the Ghan ride was no exception to this excellence.
At first, I’m sitting for quite a while chatting with Larry, with occasional bursts of jokey conversation with Emilie, who is already showing the easy laughter and a sense of slightly wild freedom that may be the center of her appeal to me - along with the blonde hair and green eyes, of course. When the lounge car opens, Larry and I are in there like a flash. Soon I am meeting people at an insane pace. (At about 9:00pm, in a moment of strange synchronicity, I look around from my table conversations to see
that I know every person in the carriage by name and story - about fifteen people all in the carriage at the same time!)
The first things on offer in the lounge car are tickets for activities at Katherine Gorge. The train stops there for four hours, and the passengers get to choose activities: from basic walks around town, up to cruises along the gorge and helicopter rides. The option that appeals to me most is canoeing, so I sign up and Larry, in a moment of madness, decides to sign up, too. When the train finally and agonizingly comes to a stop at the town of Katherine, the air seals on the door finally open to allow fresh air in for the first time since leaving Darwin (the entire train ride is sealed off in a slightly menacing Stalag 14 way: no doors or windows open until officially released by the central train Gods) and Larry and I lurch outside into the crisply warm afternoon.
There are slews of buses waiting to pick up the passengers for their various synchronized activities. It turns out that Larry and I are the only two people on the whole train
who opted for the canoeing trip! Go figure: paddling in a small, ugly, yellow, plastic, overgrown bathtub ducky-canoe in a croc infested river - what’s not to like? A loud and slightly annoying Kiwi was the driver assigned to us: We were squeezed in with the helicopter riders, the most exclusive of the tour options on offer - about $300, and a more old, wheezy, and decrepit crew of buggers can scarce be imagined. Friendly enough though. One woman was a dead ringer for Dame Edna Everage. I talked to her as if she were Barry Humphries and when I got into explaining the American meaning for, ‘thongs’, the eighty-year old I christened Madge was first to laugh! They all think we’re crazy for doing this canoe trip, and I can tell that Larry is having a change of heart, too - but it’s too late now.
Splashdown. It’s a long way from the train to Katherine Gorge. We disembark after forty-five minutes of listening to the Kiwi say, ‘actually’ every fourth word, actually, and that, actually, was actually rather annoying, actually. We get our life jackets on, our paddles, our plastic splash-proof containers, then squeezed into the tiny,
little, yellow plastic tubs that they laughingly call Canoes. It’s quickly apparent that Larry hasn’t much experience, as he rotates slowly, around and around, into the center of the river and the shipping lane. It’s very pretty and delightful to be on the water, even if the canoes could be better, and I quickly slip into a peaceful and enchanted frame of mind as I paddle away. The highlight of the three hours was finding a small ‘Freshie’, a two-meter long fresh water crocodile, perched just where the Kiwi said it would be: by the side of a kapok tree in delightful yellow bloom - apparently the crocs like to lay eggs near these trees when they’re in bloom. Larry seemed rather worried about the crocs, spending almost the whole time in the center of the river. He later claimed to have seen two crocs; one sliding in from the bank. I only saw the one. I hesitate to describe any crocodile as cute, but this one was, as the photograph here posted attests!
It was a great little break, and when we finally re-united with the helicopter people, we saw a wallow of wallabies munching on grass in
a field, as well as the white camel and water buffalo that Ms. Actually was so desperate for us to see. We get back to the train late - but not as late as some of the other buses. Back in the comfort of our Red service reclining seats, Larry said that he had found the whole thing valuable to have done, but also a bit stressful: a good work out but also nerve-wracking due to the monster crocodile possibilities in the gorge. The train starts to smoothly ooze out of the station again. Soon it will be meal time. We await the call from the Train Barbie Automated Voice System, and when it finally slimes in across the speaker systems of the train, we go to the Lounge car.
As soon as we collect our meal and sit down I can tell that I’m going to be spending most of the journey sitting here: it’s the hub of the train, the scenery flashing past, the people chatting. Larry starts up conversation with a young woman named Carly, another American from Missouri, an anthropologist, twenty-five years old, with waist-length, raven-black hair, and a lovely smile. Later, I end up
chatting in this spot with her until 2:00am - we’re the last to leave from our shifting sands of people who come and go: Barbara and Andy, an English couple are the most relaxed and amusing long-term table mates. Larry lasts until about 10:30pm before he retires. There’s all manner of story at play here, all kinds of fascinating lives: from the Kiwi who inherited from her husband’s tragic death, and now goes home for four weeks, then travels for five, a fantastic life-style, yet her face seemed etched with sadness despite her volcanic laughter and ease -( although she didn’t just join in on her own - I pulled her in), Douglas and Iris, Texans living in Sydney and doing it all through software consulting, the Korean guy who I met in Darwin at the Bus station helping him to get to the Ghan, but who couldn’t keep up with the English, but sat at the next table for much of the night anyway. As the beer flowed, and everyone started spilling amusing stories, then silly stories, the conversation flowed easily and the laughter tumbled out along with it. The conversation roamed and spun across more serious fields such
as religion, politics, then back out to funny stories and quips: For example, Carly explained about her drunken friends and their baiting of a young marsupial called a ‘Quakker’ ( not a Quaker, silly) to take chocolate from inside Carly’s friend’s shirt (don’t ask). I’m not sure what the moral of her tale was: perhaps, ”never perch a sharp clawed marsupial with a penchant for chocolate on your lap when you have double D breasts smeared in chocolate. I know it’s not exactly, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, or ‘Hansel and Gretel’, but it was amusing, nevertheless, in the telling.
Eventually, Carly and I were the last two standing, so to speak, after John the train Angel had re-opened the bar for us, with super-naturally good timing after the shock of the rather preemptory and unexpected closing time had cleared most of the carriage. As often happens with these sort of conversations and relationships, we had evolved into and through a slightly more confessional and serious phase - she had told me all about her exploits at pop-festivals, and rather surprisingly, at Grateful Dead shows, I had absorbed everything she said. My impression of Carly solidified quickly: she was simply
an extremely beautiful person I concluded. It was time to sleep: the beer was gone, the hour was late, and the morning could not be avoided or put off!
As I scrunched up my pillow and found a way to sleep amongst the gently snoozing and cooing crowd, each person bent and twisted into bizarre sculptural atrocities in vain attempts to find comfort in their personal torture devices, I thought about these last few days: three delightful, sparky, fascinating, appealing, funny, attractive, and compelling women in a row: Ruth, Emilie, and now Carly.
Gotta love travelling!
After a juicy four hours of sleep in the back-breaking chair, with my freshly purchased pillow being an absolute Godsend, I awake to the sound of the creepy Barbie announcer waking everyone for breakfast! I have a classic breakfast with Barbara and Andy. It’s not going to be that long until Alice Springs now. Carly is there and we notice the endless small flocks of budgies and parakeets performing acrobatics outside the window.
Soon it’s time to prepare for landing. I get my bags together. Larry hasn’t really been around much, but it’s OK. I wait at the door with all the
desperate nicotine starved smokers who are willing the door locks to clank open, but they’re left to suffer for an interminable time. Eventually they clunk open and we all spill out. I decide to find my hotel on foot, so I walk with some of my train friends for a while. It ends up being a thirty-minute walk to the hotel. Once there I find my room is not yet ready so I drop my bags and decide to walk back along the main street back into town where a street market and all kinds of grooviness, along with streets filled with drunk and desperate looking Aboriginal males awaits.
As I walk along, who should I see but French Emilie. I walk back with her. She checks in, then, along with Silke, a German girl from the train who had been sitting with Carly, we head into town past the sullen Aboriginal clumps through the crystal cool air to the market. Here we have something to eat at a groovy out-door café, then I buy a sweater - definitely a good idea - tomorrow I start a three-day camping-thing to Uluru, and it’s likely to be chilly - and
we return back to the Hotel. Later, Emilie and I meet up with a few more people off the train for a drink, then we blow off the movies, instead going back to the Hotel, where we sit and eat/drink at the hotel bar until late. Once again, we get to be quite intimate quickly as only strangers travelling and meeting in foreign climes can. What a lovely and delightful creature is this woman. Her cheating, lying boyfriend must have been quite a fool to lose such a person!
It was quite late by time I got back to the room. I needed to pack. The next three-day tour was only hours away, a trip to the most famous place in all of Australia, to fabled Uluru.
With the charms of Ruth, Emilie, and Carly weaving little spells, I drifted into a wonderful sleep.
See you on the flypaper…
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Now you're talking...
Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.....that's what I've been waiting to hear about! (Okay, so we can replace the drugs with alcohol, but anyway....) Very enjoyable to read the more juicy parts of your trip - keep it coming ;)