Sorry it took soo long!!

The Ghan and Darwin
Sunday the 10th of January was the day I was going to step on a train that would take me straight through Australia, from Adelaide in the South to Darwin in the North!!!
The train was going to leave Adelaide around 12:15pm and I had to be there an hour beforehand for check in. I was up early, took all the sheets off of the bed, took a shower and got dressed. Right before I left, I decided to check the papers of the trip one more time, in case I had missed something….and it turned out that I had!!!! On the paper it said that you couldn’t get to your luggage once it was checked in…WHAT??? I hadn’t read that before and I thought you could just keep your suitcase with you in the cabin. So I opened my suitcase again, took out all of the things I thought I may need and closed it again…in a hurry of course!
I checked out of the hostel around 9:30am and I called a taxi. It took a while for the company to answer the phone, but the taxi was there as soon as I walked out of the door! I could’ve taken a bus out to the train station, but this station was outside of the city and both Emma and Rose had already warned me that it would be hard to get there by bus. So a taxi was a lot easier and also a lot faster, I think it took us only 10 minutes to get there.
Someone from the Great Southern Railway was there to take my suitcase from the car and escorted me to the check in desk. Where the lady told me I could take my suitcase with me, it wasn’t all that big, so it should fit. I was really happy about that, really didn’t know what to bring and what to leave behind! I was there pretty early, so I had plenty of time for tea and a muffin!
Then I thought I was being smart and tried to walk to the start of the train, where the loc would be…but it was a pretty long train and it seemed to take forever, plus I thought I was walking in the wrong direction, which in the end I found out I was! Around 11am we could board the train. I was in carriage I, room 15/16, which was almost at the end of the hall. All the rooms were on the left hand side and then right there was a small hallway.
This was one of those things I should have booked before I came to Australia, but didn’t, so I had to book a double room for just me…now I don’t know how big a single room is, but this was really nice!!! And my suitcase fitted very nicely underneath the closet, without being in the way! Basically a room is a big couch on the right side, with a small bathroom and closet on the left side. Then there’s a small table which you can fold down into the wall, so you can open the closet. There was a radio I could choose different channels and the window had foldable blinds. The bathroom was really small…and I mean really small! I think the one my grandma and I had in our cabin on our first rivercruise was bigger! There was a sink and the toilet and the shower was right next to the toilet, meaning it would get wet while taking a shower. Ok, there was a shower curtain which you could close all the way around it, but still it didn’t seem like a good idea. I honestly didn’t try it, taking a shower in a moving train didn’t seem like a good idea at all. Washing up by the sink turned out to be a challenge also!
Anyway, the lady at the door of the carriage was kind of cranky and told everyone to wait in their rooms, she would stop by later to ask us which excursion we wanted to do. It took her a while to get there, I was beginning to think she wasn’t going to come! For Alice Springs I opted for the Desert Park and for Katherine I wanted to see the Rock Art in the gorge.
Then another lady stopped by to discuss meal times. Lunch that day was set for 1pm, the next day there would be a brunch, dinner I set for 6:30pm for both days and lunch on the last day would be at 1:30pm. The breakfast and brunch times were already set times, you could come and go whenever you wanted to within that time. I’m not sure how many rooms were going to go in at once, but there were at least 3 seatings for dinner.
We left Adelaide at 12:15pm sharp. The first leg of the trip wasn’t all that interesting, most of it I had already seen when I drove into Adelaide by bus after my great ocean road trip. At 1pm we had lunch, you could choose from 2 different main courses and dessert was a Lemon Merengue pie. I had a beef tenderloin for main course, it was very good! Although the cranky lady from that morning was serving us…she got better later on. I was sitting with a couple from Denmark and a gentleman from the UK. The couple mostly talked to each other and the gentleman didn’t say much at all. He didn’t take dessert, he left right after he was done.
When lunch was over I went back to my room, to read and look at the scenery. Finally managed to finish a book!!! At the end of each carriage was a small room where you could get coffee or tea whenever you wanted to, which I had found pretty quick of course! Around 6:30pm I went back to the diningroom for dinner. I was sitting with Wendy and Graham. We were having fun, because I kept seeing kangaroos, wallabies and emus and they didn’t see anything!! Haha Wendy said she thought I was dreaming! Too bad the train was moving too fast to take a good picture, plus they always appeared just as I was putting food in my mouth!!! I’m sure I saw an Australian Redback, the biggest kangaroo in Australia, only lives in the red center. I saw it resting on the ground. The track was winding, so I could see the loc from time to time and take pictures of it. And the sunset was amazing!!!
The food was great!!! I had duck as an entrée, I had the penne pasta as main course and a cheese plate for dessert, very yummy!! After dinner I went to my room where now my couch was a bed. I don’t think there’s a lot they have to do for this. It looked like the bed was the back part of the couch, which was pulled down onto the bottom of the couch. Since this was a double room, there was also a bed above me, but since I was in there by myself they didn’t have to pull it down. Which I didn’t mind at all, because it looked like there wasn’t a whole lot of space between them. And I was wondering how people ever managed to climb up into that bed at all! Most of the people on board are a lot older then I am and even to me it seemed like a challenge!! Not thinking about the fact that you sleep while the train is moving, you will certainly feel like you’re falling out of it!! I know for sure that I did in the bottom bed!!
I opened the shades so I could still look outside until it got really dark, while I was typing my stories because I’m way behind….wait a minute, I still am!!! Hahah
I turned the lights off around 10pm and tried to go to sleep.
I had asked one of the crew what the best time would be to get up the next day to see the sunrise in Marla. According to her that would be 5am, so my alarm went off at 5am. I got up and got dressed and got off of the train in the dark….it was pretty cool! The train gets to Marla around 3:30am and people can get off to see the sun rise if they want to. They had lighted a path along the tracks with gaslights, there were tables set up with coffee, tea and juice and there were picknick tables where we could sit and wait. They also offered something to eat, they call it an eggslider, an egg and bacon on a white bun…I had taken one and while I was walking over to the tables, the egg yolk ran down my hand….YUK!!!! Turned out it was a runny egg, so I asked for napkins which took a while to get there. I threw it away, I really hate runny eggs!! There was a lady who had a bigger problem! She had taken a big bite and the egg ran down her shirt!!! Either the waitress that handed these things out could have told us before we took them ór they shouldn’t have put runny egss on a bun…I kind of thought it was a strange thing to do…
Anyway, I was up at 5am and it turned out that the sun wasn’t supposed to come up until 6am…so I could’ve stayed in bed a little longer!!! I had dressed warm, thinking it would be cold in the dessert, I was wearing my jeans, a vest, my coat and a scarf….but it was really hot already!!!! Couldn’t take it off quickly enough, it was really hot!!
So here we were, waiting for the sun to come up and eventually we didn’t really see it! Ok, we did see the dark sky disappear and a little of the pretty colors the sky gets when the sun comes up or goes down, but it was too cloudy to actually see the sun! But as soon as it was up, the nasty flies appeared too! Around 7am we had to get back on the train. I went straight to bed!!! Brunch was served from 7:30am to 12pm, so I decided to get a couple of more hours in!
At 8am the train started moving again, making it’s way to Alice Springs. I had set my alarm for 10am, at which time I got up and got dressed again. I had brunch in the restaurant with two people I didn’t get the names of. The landscape had changed overnight, the earth getting it’s famous red color.
I didn’t see much wildlife, lots of cows though…dead ones also! Some just skeletons with skin and this morning cows that had just died, bloated and feet up!
We were I Alice Springs around 1pm, where we got on buses to go to the Desert Park. We had a really funny bus driver, she was telling us things about the city and about the weather! She said that it the weatherman predicted a thunderstorm and rain, but she said he was from Darwin, so he didn’t know any better!!! And she urged us all to keep drinking water and plenty of it! It was 40 degrees (Celsius) and really, really hot! She told us that the first symptoms of dehydration are that a person gets grumpy, so as soon as we noticed a grumpy person, we should give that person a bottle of water!!
It was really hot!! When we got to the park, someone guided us through it and showed us some of the animals and plants that are found in this area. We also got to watch a bird show, which was really nice. At the end we got to see a short movie and at 5pm we were back on the bus…by which time the thunder had started!!! By the time we were on the back on the train it had started to rain, so I guess that weatherman was right this time!!
We left Alice Springs around 6pm and I had dinner aroudn6:30pm. This time I was sitting at the table with Harry and Barbara, who had done this trip before. I had a kangaroo steak and a slice of a crocodile sausage!!! Which they say tastes like chicken, but there were so many spices in there, it didn’t even taste like chicken. But it was good though!!
That evening I turned the lights out around 9pm already, I was sooo tired!!
Tuesday morning breakfast was between 6:30 and 8:30am. I had set my alarm for 8:30am and I had slept a lot better than on the first night! I had a bowl of muesli with yoghurt and a crepe with blueberry sauce, very good!
Around 9am we were in Katherine, where a bus took us to the Katherine gorge, or Nitmiluk gorge as the Aboriginals call it. Here we got on a boat that took us through gorge number 1 and we got to see the rock art that is there. There’s 13 gorges in there and they name them according to the numbers. The gorge was beautiful and the guy that told us about it, knew a lot of stuff. But the rock art was a bit disappointing really, I thought there would be much more, but it was only one big painting and several smaller once, which we could hardly see. Plus for all his saying that the art is like a book to them, he didn’t really know what it said.
We went back to the train afterwards and we left Katherine at 1pm for Darwin. I had lunch at 1:30pm and I was sitting at the table with Grahame and Wendy again. The scenery had changed by the way, it was a lot greener, we saw cows and at least millions of termite hills!! Man, there were a lot of them and some of them were huge!! Took me a while to get a picture of a big one!
We were in Darwin at 5pm, included in the price for the train ride was also the transfer to the city. Which was great, because there were no buses and the taxi would’ve cost a fortune! I was dropped off at a hotel on the Esplanade, which wasn’t all too far from the hotel I had booked.
This time I didn’t go to the YHA, but I had looked for hotelrooms with a similar price, only with a hotelroom comes a bathroom, which I thought would be a plus.
But at soon as I saw the outside of the hotel I was staying at, I knew what it was going to look like on the inside….and I was right!!! Ok, it didn’t cost all that much, but the picture on the website looked a lot better than real life!
The driver on the transfer had already warned us about not giving any money to the homeless, which were mostly Aboriginals. He said that if you gave something to one of them, the rest would come out and demand money off of you also…and I did see a lot of them, mostly drunk too. Across the street was a supermarket where I got some groceries and I went to bed early that night.
Darwin…I didn’t like that city at all. It felt like it did in Cairns, not safe. The place gave me the creeps!! If I had known beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have stayed as long as I have. I didn’t do all that much there, partly because it was too hot to do anything and partly because most of the touroperators didn’t operate during the dry season! I wanted to go and see the jumping crocodiles and I had two touroperators to choose from. I wanted to go with the cheaper one, seeing as they both did the same thing. But that one didn’t go, because there was no one who had wanted to go….hello, but I wanted to go!!! But then I could go with the other one…Now why would I pay $25,- more for something I know I can do cheaper???? So no, I didn’t go and see the jumping crocodiles!
I got on the hop on hop off bus and the first day I did the full round, the next day I got on the bus and hopped off at the museum there. Since it wasn’t all that busy, they didn’t make a big deal out of what time you got back on the bus, as long as you had a ticket it was ok. Good, the museum was free and now I could take my time to look around. They had a stuffed, 5 meter long crocodile called Sweetheart, which is actually a male. His name came from being the only make crocodile in a certain area, where he would scare away all of the male fishermen, thinking they were a threat for him. After a couple of these scare tactics, they wanted to move him somewhere else. So they drugged him, but while trying to life his heavy body into the boat, they drowned him…..so this is what happens when humans interrupt!! They should’ve just left him alone and go fish somewhere else!!!!
There were also other stuffed animals that you could find in these areas and they had an exhibition about Cyclone Tracey, that hit Darwin in 1974, one of the biggest cyclones ever. The wind speeds went up to 260km, after that the machine broke and they couldn’t measure the speed anymore. It was kind of strange…I mean they knew something was coming, but because it was Christmas eve and the fact that a couple of weeks earlier there was another cyclone that didn’t hit land, they kind of didn’t pay attention to it. But it left the biggest damage ever, that’s why there are no old buildings in the city and they had to evacuate thousands of people. Now there were only about 70 people that had died, there were several reports, all giving a different number. But for example Napier in NZ was hit by an earthquake in 1932 and that left 258 people dead…here in Darwin they treated the cyclone like the worst thing that could’ve happened, when I think they may have come off lucky, it could have been a lot worse. Anyway, after this big cyclone, the warning systems and the houses that were build, did improve and I don’t think something like this happened again. So at least I got to spend a couple of hours of this day!
Then I hopped on the bus again and I got off at the Darwin Waterfront, which they also made a pretty big deal off, but there was nothing there really. Ok, they had a swimming pool that produced waves, which they never get otherwise. Swimming in the ocean around here is not a very good idea, unless you want to feed the sharks. I had some lunch there and I went back to the hotel.
In the same street as the hotel I was staying at, a couple of doors down, was a zoo sort of with all kinds of crocodiles and it even had a Cage of Death….Oehoeh…..Which basically was a large transparent plastic tube, where you got into climbing down a ladder. On the other side of the tube was a large crocodile in a way too tiny pool if you ask me. They would dangle a piece of meat above it’s head and of course it would rear up and snap it’s giant mouth around the meat….now that is really scary!!!! To me it was just pathetic, so I didn’t even go there either! I have seen crocodiles before, so I wasn’t really interested anyway.
Darwin is very hot and humid in this time of year, with the occasional thunderstorms and rain. There were a couple of showers when I was there and one time I found a cockroach in the bathroom!!!! Not a big one, like the ones Pauline and I saw in Bangkok, but still…well, small enough for me to grab it with tissue and throw it in the toilet!! And then the next night, there was a baby cockroach, which also ended up in the toilet!! And of course I put a towel on the floor to close the gap underneath the bathroom door!!!
So here I was in Darwin and I had to decided what to do next. I had already looked at it when I was still in Adelaide, but couldn’t make up my mind. Now that I was looking at it again, the prices of flying to Uluru had gone up, as they do of course. Even the prices of the hostel were pretty steep and the reviews were not very positive. Plus it was the hottest time of the year….so I decided not to go to Uluru. This was one of those things I should’ve booked before I came to Australia, but never figured I had to. It’s a shame to be so close and not to go there. But then I also didn’t know it would be such a hassle to actually get there and I just didn’t feel like going through that either.
So I had decided to go back to Adelaide on Saturday, January 16th. And then move on to Perth, for my last couple of days in Australia before I was going home from there.
Adelaide and Perth will be another story!

Love Linda