Sydney to Adelaide
February 9th
Finally, the day came to leave Sydney. It was the well into February and we wanted to get out of the country by the end of the month. We intended to spend a couple of weeks in Darwin on the way through, so we didn't have the time for the long leisurely type of journey that i normally preferred. However, i'd spent long enough travelling in Australia and that didn't really bother me much, all i really wanted to do now was get out of the place!
I loved the economy sleeper carriage of the Indian Pacific. You got a small twin berth cabin in a car with a beautiful, wood paneled wavy corridor running down the middle - walking along it when the train was moving was like something out of the "haunted house" at the funfair. It was one of the very few examples of truly inspired design i'd ever come across. The cabins were small, but not unbearable. There were two facing seats, a couple of very skinny cupboards a drinking water fountain and a pull-down stainless steel washbasin, with hot and cold running water! It was certainly the most luxurious train carriage i'd ever travelled in - and this was only economy class. First class must have been incredible!
We were both vegans, so we took plenty of food with us, as you could never get vegan food on trains. This was probably the most comfortable and pleasant 1800 kilometres i'd ever get to travel - in surface transport, anyway.
It was an interesting trip. Once we got off the coastal plain where Sydney's situated, the first part of the journey was through the Blue Mountains to the west. There are a few towns on the train route on the eastern side of the mountains, the most well known one is probably Katoomba. They're almost far outer suburbs of Sydney, as they're mostly within commuting distance of the city, but they're surrounded by densely forested mountain landscape which has the feeling of being a million miles away from that frantic and inhospitable metropolis.
Lithgow comes later, somewhere around the highest bit of the line and then there's Bathurst, with it's much hated jail, as you head down the other side of the range. From there on it's pretty well flat all the way to Adelaide, with a fair chunk of desert, or semi-desert as you go out towards the mining town of Broken Hill. Broken Hill's in New South Wales, but it's getting close to the border of South Australia at this point and they use South Australian time there, which is half an hour behind the time on the east coast.
The last quarter or third of the trip was depressing. The countryside all around, for as far as you could see, was badly ruined agricultural land - not entirely disimliar to some of the tired land i was to see in Mexico three months later.