well i’m on my way…

I boarded the train at 630 Sunday night in Adelaide with no expectations.  I had a window seat, which I was happy about, and an empty one next to me-score!  I learned that I would get a seatmate in Port Augusta at 11 pm that night.  I laid down across the seats and enjoyed the space while I could.  There was nothing but trainyards and suburbs to look at until the sun set.  I enjoyed my dinner of PB&J, an apple, and of course, Tim Tams.  I was woken up at 1030 to make room for my seatmate-an Aboriginal woman and her baby.  I’m sure you all know how thrilled I was to have a baby sitting next to me.  She was cute but very vocal.  The seat reclined suprisingly far back and I had a pretty decent night of sleep.

Around 10 am the next morning we stopped in Cook, a town of 4 people, only to run  souvineir shop and store water for the trains to refill.  I walked around for a few minutes until I realized I was in the outback again and did not feel like swatting flies away from my face!  Halfway through the next day people started moving around and the Aboriginal woman went to sit next to her husband.  I laid down again and zoned out to my iPod.  My day consisted of this: read Lord of the Rings, listen to my iPod, and look out at the nothingness of the Nullabor Plain.  Nullabor is derived from the Latin term meaning “no trees” or “without trees” or something like that.  You get the idea.  There was nothing.  This was the outback I had anticipated 2 weeks ago when I first arrived in Alice Springs.  Wow.  This Nullabor Plain also boasts the longest straight line of track-477 km.  It curves a bit and then runs on for another hundreds of kilometers of straight track.  Bo-ring!  My breakfast, lunch, and dinner consisted of PB&J, apples, and Tim Tams until the apples and Tim Tams ran out.  I won’t be eating peanut butter for a while. 

We arrived in Kalgoorlie-Boulder around 7 and we had a three and a half hour stop.  I took the whistlestop tour and boarded the bus headed for the gold mines-and don’t you know, they will be the biggest quarry in the world by 2017 when they’ve finished cutting into the ground.  It seems everything in Australia is the biggest, most, first, only…I’m beginning to think the Guinness Book of World Records was started here.  We drove past Paddy Hannan’s statue, house, and tree; he was the first recorded person to find gold in Kalgoorlie-or was it Boulder?  It started out as two towns, but as they became bigger, they kind of meshed into one.  This town also is the only town that has legalized prostitution in Western Australia (or is it all of Australia?) so of course we drove by the burlesque houses.  The older men on my tour seemed pretty impressed and made a few comments about being dropped off here.  Ha ha. 

I noticed that the town was not well lit-and nothing seemed open except for a few restaurants and of course the burlesque houses.  We arrived back at the train station an hour and a half before we were supposed to leave, but I still hung out at the train station for that time.  There was no way I was going to walk around a dark city at night by myself!

Quite a few people got off the train at Kalgoorlie, so there were a bunch of empty seats, meaning that I had two all to myself!  I laid across them and slept until 7 the next morning.  We were supposed to arrive in Perth at 9 am, but I guess we stopped for a few hours for some reason or other so we arrived in Perth at 1130.  No biggie-I was booked at the worst-rated hostel in Fremantle (suburb of Perth) and I was in no hurry to get there.

All in all, the train ride was nice, but I wouldn’t do it again. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.