On the Ghan

I am typing this entry while seated in the dining car of the mighty Ghan, a luxury passenger train traveling from Adelaide to Darwin right through the center of the continent. As i look out the window and a flat, brush covered countryside reminicent of the mesquite country around Sonoita, Arizona, I am reflecting on how we got here

We left Gloucester last Friday for a drive to the airport at Newcastle. It was a long and winding journey, as is every drive in this country. On the east coast of Australia there is no such thing as a level, straight road, and almost as rare are stretches where the pavement is in good repair. Once we got to the airport we boarded the jet for Adelaide, a two and a half hour flight that actually served a meal of sorts. (American airliners take note: it is of small expense to provide something to your passengers beyond a miserly package of stale pretzels and it goes a long way towards improving the disposition of your customers.) We spent two nights in Adelaide waiting for the train in what was purported to be a five star hotel and took in a few sights, including the Adelaide art museum and the Library of South Australia. The latter was particularly impressive with the standard lofty reading room and interesting exhibits of documents and publications pertaining to Australian history. The downtown area where we stayed is a bit rowdy, though, and during my early morning walk on Saturday I passed crowds of thirty-something revelers who had apparently been at it all night. The trash strewn on the streets from these folks was incredible, and before I returned to the hotel at sunrise an army of street sweepers and leaf blowers were busily cleaning up the mess. It is a never ending job because the same thing happened Sunday morning as well

MUCH LATER: The train passed through miles and miles of outback terrain, with the parched contryside getting drier as we moved north. The brunch in the dining car proved very adequat. I passed on a traditional English breakfast of bacon, sausage, beans, egg, toast and a fried tomato to settle on a chicken breast served on basmati rice. Superior to last night's dinner, I ate it all and eagerly awaited the off train experiences that we signed up for at the beginning of the trip. Jayne and I chose to do the "Explorer" package consisting of several sites in Alice Springs, a city of about 28,000 in the heart of Australia. It was surprising to see civilzation after so many uninhabited miles and we disembarked at the train station to board a passenger bus that took us to the oldest European built site in the Northern Territory: the Alice Spings telegraph station. When my son Benjamin was a young adult he confessed to us that during his childhood he tired of being hauled to "crappy frontier towns" during our family vacations. It is true I overdid it back then, preferring the ambiance of false fronted wooden buidlings lining dusty streets in various western states we traveled through, and that Benjamin could not appreciate my obsessions because he had not grown up watching "Gunsmoke" on television as I did in the early 1960s. The Alice Springs telegraph station was a collection of buildings constructed in

the nineteenth century, a small community built around the only available water source to service the trans-continental telegraph line which parallels the present day route of this railroad from Adelaide to Darwin. The tour guide explained that the first explorers mistakenly thought that a stagnant pond in a dry riverbed was actually the site of a spring, and that the person who located the station named it after the wife of his employer. Unfortunately, Alice never visited the place because she could not bear travel by camel back (the only option in this parched land) and so as a result "Alice Springs" is really niether "Alice" nor a "Spring." This did not stop the locals from erecting a statue at the train station to commemorate the camel journey she never took!

Other stops on the day tour were at a reptile center where an active, chirpy bloke who spoke with machine-gun rapidity told us about fifty times that the dangers to humans from Australia's notorious venomous snakes has been severely exaggerated, but that the danger from salt water crocodiles was certainly very real. I believed him. The last stop on the tour was at the Alice Springs School of the Air, an institution founded in 1951 to provide distance education to isolated outback children by means of a ham radio broadcast. The service continues today via the internet, but it was interesting to think that these people had pioneered the idea of distance learning seventy years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today's off train trip will be to Katherine Gorge where we will board a tour boat and sail out among the crocodiles. Should I survivel, I will report the results in my next entry.