Crazy women, cute train attendants, a shy boy from Texas and one big country - Megan Czisz takes her friends on a train through the outback.

V.I.Ps

 ‘Now, I’m only telling you this because you’re VIPs, girls. Do you know what that means? Vee Eye Peeeee.’

My friends and I sneak looks at each other, thin lipped, trying not to smirk, as the woman leans in close and stares at us one by one.

 ‘Very Important People?’ I suggest. 

 ‘Exactly!’ she slams one hand down on the table. We all jump, mindful of the champagne glass in her other hand and the rollicking movement of the train. ‘And that’s why I’m telling you. Because you need to know.’

As suddenly as she arrived, the woman excuses herself, stumbling bow legged through the lounge car towards her carriage, leaving us with the giggles for ages.

The woman who bailed us up not long after we left Sydney’s Central Station was only the first character of many. We were taking one and a half of the world’s great train journeys – from Sydney to Adelaide on the Indian Pacific, and from Adelaide to Darwin aboard the Ghan. While everyone we knew was going north to Queensland to escape winter in Sydney we were going out back, and it raised more than a few eyebrows.

Longer than a flight from Sydney to London, the first leg of the trip, from Central Station in Sydney to Adelaide’s Keswick terminal, took just over twenty four hours. We had tickets for Red Kangaroo daynighter seats the whole way, similar in style to an economy seat on a long haul flight. But unlike a long haul flight, we could sit on cushy lounges in the lounge car, eat our meals at tables in the dining car and most importantly, stretch our legs and watch the city, then the bush, then the outback, go by.  

Going West

It’s a long first night, with the sun already gone by the time we reach Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I am jerked in and out of sleep by the air-conditioning, passengers stumbling past me for the toilet and every time I wake the train is rattling and flying through the night so fast I’m afraid we’ll go careening off the rails. Which is incredibly unlikely – the train never reaches speeds of much more than 115km/hr, but it’s a lot faster than the suburban trains I’m used to.

Broken Hill train station before sunrise

Just before six the next morning we arrive in Broken Hill. It’s still dark, but local residents have set up little stalls along the platform, and bleary-eyed, I buy a postcard. The girls and I stand in a huddle, in tracksuits we would never wear outside the house back in Sydney. The decision is unanimous – stuff the town tour, we’re going to find McDonalds. We head off down Sulphide Street, and it doesn’t take long to get lost, but we’re soon pointed in the right direction by two women out on a morning walk in the five degree air. They don’t even need to ask where we’re going. They take one look at our poor sleep deprived selves, hoods and daggy backpacks and ask, ‘McDonalds?’

The silver city, as they call the isolated mining town of Broken Hill, is over 1000 kilometres from Sydney. The closest town is Silverton, a virtual ghost town, and the fact that the Mad Max films were filmed nearby gives you some idea of how desolate the landscape is.

We walk back past the trainshipping yard to the train station and spend the trip to Adelaide in the lounge car. We have an hour in Adelaide before we change trains and board the Ghan for the trip to Darwin, while the Indian Pacific heads across the Nullarbor without us. 

During the brief stop, we have the option of taking a whistlestop tour of the city, but instead we decide to spend the hour in a food court in Rundle Mall, still in our tracksuits.  They are quickly becoming a theme on this trip.  

Finally out back

Our second night on the train is much easier than the first. We have our squeezy tubes of vegemite to entertain us for dinner. Two of the girls sneak in to the lounge car around midnight to sleep on the couches, and manage a couple of hours of horizontal sleep before being kicked out by a train attendant.  Occasionally during the night I am woken by the stillness of the train, pulled over to a stop in a siding to let freight trains go by.

Sunrise over the desert

I am up before sunrise again, and somehow, overnight, it’s as if we have caught the train to another planet. Out the windows, looking east, the sky is pitch black but for a small ball of red light, growing larger across the horizon. It is easily the most spectacular sunrise I have ever seen.

When the sun finally rises, we are in the middle of the desert, somewhere between Adelaide and Alice Springs. There is flat nothing on either side of the train, just low green and brown scrub, and red dirt. The country is so huge, and the map I have so ambiguous that none of us have any idea whether we have crossed the border into the Northern Territory. I ask a train attendant the last town we’ve passed, and he has no idea.

A Town Like Alice

Welcome to Alice Springs

It’s cold when we finally pull into the platform-less station in Alice Springs. Somehow, we’d convinced ourselves that 11 degree celsius weather in the outback would be a warm 11 degrees. But no, 11 degrees is 11 degrees and the tracksuits stay on.

The train continues on its way to Darwin without us, and we spend a welcome two nights lying out flat in hostel bunk beds in the Alice. We take a day trip out to Uluru and Kata Tjuta, some five hundred kilometres away, and our tour guide reminds us throughout the day that we are travelling the equivalent of the length of Japan in one day.

Somehow, we manage to pick up a backpacker from Texas at the hostel bar, and he joins us on the next leg of our trip. We stand at the Alice Springs station, waiting for the Ghan to pull in, and our Texan friend clutches his pillow that he’s brought with him from home. Home in Texas. Once we board, he causes a ruckus, playing at train attendant as he arranges seat swaps so he can sit with us. He is charming, baby faced, and calls us y’all.

We spend most of the night in the lounge car as the train hurtles through the desert. We flirt with the cute train attendants, and the Texan patiently answers our ridiculous questions about barbeques in his home state, ribs, his virginity and his What Would Jesus Do? bracelet. After the trip is over, we never hear from him again despite out best efforts to contact him (read: internet stalking), and I now wonder if we made him uncomfortable?  

Crocodiles in the Post Office

Katherine Gorge

We book ourselves onto a cruise of Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge for the following morning, one of the touring options offered by Great Southern Rail (the company that owns the Ghan) during the brief stop in the town of Katherine. With scores of other passengers, we are bussed over to the gorge, and the driver regales us with tales of how Katherine floods every year, fondly recalling the time a crocodile ended up in the post office.

Because from here on out, we’re in croc country. As we are warned over and over by our Steve Irwin lookalike tour guide on a tour of Litchfield National Park just outside of Darwin the following day, every body of water in northern Australia is home to crocodiles, if you’re not careful you will end up doing the crocodile roll. Oh sure, there might be some freshies in this pool of water that you’re about to swim in, but they wont bite.

As we board the boat, we’re warned to keep all our limbs inside the vessel – it’s breeding season, and there are toey crocs about. There are also plenty of canoeists about, and I eye them anxiously. I don’t really want to watch anyone getting mauled today.

Ancient reptilian beasts aside, the gorge cruise is one of the most amazing boat rides I have ever taken. After the chill of central Australia, the temperature has climbed about twenty degrees to a beautiful thirty degrees. The views are incredible – the water is blue as, the vegetation lush, and we are surrounded by rising sandstone cliffs. With a light breeze stirred up over the water by the movement of the boat, it is a high point of the trip.

It is dusk as the train pulls into Darwin some hours later. We are all on a high, standing around waiting for our bags to be unloaded in the thick tropical air. Eight days and nearly 5000 kilometres after we left home, we are closer to Indonesia than Sydney.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Indian Pacific and the Ghan were recently named two of the best railway journeys in the world. Rather than a means of getting from A to B as quickly as possible, Great Southern Rail journeys are unforgettable, and a unique way of experiencing such an epic country.