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Hello Year 5!
Wow what an adventure I have been on...I have just travelled across the whole of Australia by train. I have not only crossed a whole country, but also an entire continent! The train I caught is called the Indian-Pacific because it runs from Sydney on the Pacific Ocean in eastern Australia to Perth on the Indian Ocean in the west. The train journey took 3 days and 3 nights and covered 4352 kilometres, which is the same as travelling from England to Egypt or Iraq!
Unfortunately the train was running late from the start so we didn't get to visit many places along the way as they had to make up time to stop us being late into Perth. I missed seeing the Blue Mountains again as it was dark by the time we left Sydney. Hopefully someone else will still take me there on a nice day! We were also supposed to stop for tours in Broken Hill (a silver mining town in outback New South Wales), Adelaide (the capital of South Australia), and Kalgoolie (a gold mining town in Western Australia), but we only had 20 minutes in each of them so I didn't
Spot the emu
there is a dust cloud where it is running away, another one is hiding behind a bush! see much more than the train stations.
Even though we didn't stop at many places I saw a lot of Australia from the windows of the train. I can now tell you that there is not very much in a lot of Australia! For hours and hours all I could see outside the window was flat bushland all the way to the horizon. This bushland is called The Outback in Australia and covers most of the interior of the country. Australia doesn't get very much rain so not a lot grows apart from scrubby bushes and grasses. We woke up early on the train and saw the sunrise which was nice. At this time we saw kangaroos and emus running around near the train line. If you haven't seen an emu before it is a very big bird with a long neck, a bit like an ostrich, and they can run very fast.
On the second day of our journey we passed a massive body of water called Menindee Lakes that took nearly an hour for the train to drive past. All the Australian people on board were very excited to see the lakes full of water because
for ten years Australia had been in a drought and these lakes had been bone dry! They have had lots of rain this summer though so the lakes are now full again.
On the third day we travelled through the Nullabor Plain in Western Australia. The Nullabor Plain means 'flat land of no trees' and it is a very appropriate name for this area. The Nullabor Plain is very big, twice the size of England in fact, and took the train all day to drive across. All day all we could see was flat country with scrubby little saltbushes and the occasional eagle. The sky seemed really big because there was nothing else to look at. We got a suprise when the train suddenly slowed down and we saw a herd of cows had just crossed the line in front of us!
We stopped at two towns in the Nullabor Plain, both towns only have 2 people permanently living in them! The first town we stopped at was called Cook and here the train refilled its water tanks while we had a little walk around. Cook just has a few wooden and tin buildings but once upon a
time it was a thriving town with a school, hospital and gaol (prison) when people lived here to help build and supply the railway. The second place we stopped at was called Forrest, but it doesn't have many trees, instead it was named after an old prime minister of Australia. We didn't get off the train here but a lady cycled up to the train to collect her post and groceries! Imagine if you lived in a place where there was only one other person and your shopping was delivered to you twice a week by train. The nearest shop to Cook and Forrest is hundreds of kilometres away so you would hope the train didn't forget your milk!
On the train we had a reclining seat, a bit like the ones on aeroplanes but a bit bigger and with more legroom. This was where you sat during the day and slept at night! In each carriage there was a toilet and shower. The train had a buffet car where you could buy hot food and snacks and a lounge car with armchairs where we sat a lot during the day. Richer people slept in private cabins with chairs
that folded out to become bunk beds.
After 65 hours we arrived into Perth, which is the capital city of Western Australia. It is warmer and sunnier here than it was in Sydney. It is also a lot quieter than most cities I have visited. For a couple of days I have been walking all around Perth making up for sitting down for three days on the train! I have seen some nice old colonial buildings (built when the first people from England came over to Australia), and a few weird new ones like the bell tower, which contains bells from a church in London. Perth is also home to lots of Black Swans. These are the same as the white swans you see in England, except they are pitch black. They are so common here that the river that runs through Perth is named after them.
Now Frankie is going to take me on her travels up the west coast of Australia so hopefully I will be able to tell you all about that soon.
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Seth,Ethan and Jackie
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thank you
Wow! What a long train journey and train! Hope Flat Seth didn't get travel sick lol. 65 hours in a train! The longest train journey we've ever done is about 10 hours and that was long enough. We look forward to hearing more of Flat Seth's travel tales.