The Long Trip Back Home, day CXIV-CXXI: Across Australia
Last time I updated I had just finished the fortnight-long wander east across Indonesia (Java and Bali), on the last half of the fifth sector of my trip, and the last overseas country before finally returning to my home country after nearly 4 solid months on the move. After a very early morning departure from the hotel in Ubud at 0530hrs to make it to Denpasar airport on time (and needing to pay an annoying IDR200,000 departure tax after getting stamped out of Immigration), my AirAsia Airbus A330-200 flight left on time at 0900hrs Saturday morning, to land at Perth airport 3.5hrs later at 1230hrs (Western Australian time, thankfully no timezone changes needed for this particular flight).
After a surprisingly-quick process going through Immigration (thankfully an Australian passport most likely helped) and retrieving my rucksack quickly (and not even stopped by AQIS to my great surprise: each time I've flown internationally into Melbourne and Sydney, the Quarantine guards they at least x-rayed my baggage!), I visited an ATM and then passed some mobile GSM provider stands in the Arrivals section, and after a few minutes comparing PAYG/no-contract plans eventually bought an Optus SIM and $30 starter pack, registered on their network, and was allocated a new Australian mobile number (which I needed: Dodo stupidly lost my old Australian mobile number two years ago when they unilaterally torpedoed my sleeper plan account without even bothering to contact me, to which I'm still somewhat annoyed, as I was quite happy with my old mobile number thankyou very much!). It was a quick walk to the taxi rank from there, and 25min and $45 later arrived in the Travelodge hotel in central Perth.
I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Perth's CBD/inner city district, enjoying the sun without the cloying humidity for the first time in a long time (28deg, finally a dry heat!).....until I passed a Woolworths and the urge to stock up on some Australian snackfoods was too strong (Burger Rings! Tim Tam biscuits! Cheezels! Chicos!). Central Perth was a nice place to walk around, but apart from the weather the other thing I had to adjust to was the language: it had been quite some time since I had walked in a country that used English as a default language. Also there was the accent: having travelled with a few Australians in my epic trip I had gotten used to the Aussie drawl from a few travel buddies.....but now I was deluged by Aussie accents, and it surprised me by how much I had to retrain my ears to adjust to it. I hadn't been surrounded by Australian accents since the last time I was here, over 3.5 years ago, for my sister's wedding in Melbourne. It only made my accent - decidedly British in comparison - stand out all the more!
Eventually walking around most of central Perth and it's attractions, I later decided to catch a Transperth local train 30min to Fremantle, perched where the Swan River emptied out into the Indian Ocean, and spent the last part of the afternoon and the evening there, discovering the lovely architecture: it reminded me a lot of Williamstown in Melbourne. After wandering along its streets and parklands, I had dinner there and eventually caught a train back into central Perth.
Sunday was the next major leg of travel: after checking out of the hotel (at 1000hrs, virtually a sleep-in by recent standards), I walked to the local station with the rucksack and daypack and caught the train for a short ride to East Perth, arriving at 1035hrs. Sitting there elegantly in its own platform was the 20-carriage Indian-Pacific train, nearly 600m long, consisting of silver Pullman carriages from the United States, dating from the 1980s and rebuilt and refurbished to Australian gauge and standards by Comeng. Boarding started at 1055hrs, and we eventually departed East Perth station on time an hour later at 1155hrs.
As I had paid for my Indian-Pacific ticket months ago, I had taken advantage of a 25% discount for full payment 6 months before departure, which had allowed me to upgrade to a Gold Class sleeper cabin of my own (instead of a Red Class seat sleeper). My cabin was a little cramped, but I had my own private space, with a comfy seat next to a fold-down table; the seat extended into a single bed which was actually quite comfortable (and, to my surprise, was actually long enough to accommodate me....just!). I had a fold-away sink, power-point and plenty of compartments for personal items and clothes. This was important: my rucksack had to be squared away seperately in the baggage wagon, usually locked and not accessible during the trip, so I needed a change of clothes in my daypack I could bring with me amongst other things for the 4 days I would be living on the train. Other Gold carriages accommodated full seating for two people that folded out into dual-level bunks, with the odd Gold Superior cabin that featured actual double-beds.
Our end (the Gold class section) featured its own lounge carriage - which I spent some time in over the next four days, enjoying a drink and reading, or just chatting with other travellers and enjoying the incredible view outside the windows - and the Queen Adelaide restaurant, the dedicated dining carriage with silver service and an exceptional menu (beef, lamb, kangaroo, barramundi, and poached salmon were just some of the offerings on the menu for lunch and dinner). As a Gold ticket-holder, I was entitled to three meals a day in the restaurant car and unlimited drinks, although if I wanted hard liquor or champagne I had to pay extra for it; I got reacquainted with Coopers Pale Ale and Crown Lager very quickly! Most of the other travellers I got to know over the following 4 days, either sitting in the lounge or over the lunch/dinner table, were mostly retired, older Australian passengers travelling for the most part all the way to Sydney (with a few leaving at Adelaide). There were some Australian families - mum, dad and the kids travelling in the one compartment - and a few older tourists - I came across a few Brits and Canadians - but oddly not many other younger tourists like myself; I supposed the price and time needed to travel in this way tended to point more to the older traveller.
The service stopped from time to time: we slowly trundled east across the southern part of Western Australia, passing through Northam and Southern Cross through Sunday afternoon and stopped briefly in Kalgoorlie later that evening (with a brief off-train excursion around the deserted streets and to Kalgoorlie's Super Pit, a 3.6km-wide open-cut gold-mine, flood-lit to allow 24hr operation since 1989), and onto the straightest part of the Trans-Australian railway - the world's longest, stretching 476km in a straight line - for a 20min stop-over at noon on Monday in Cook (originally a small town of 200 with its own hospital, virtually abandoned when the railway was privatised in 1997 and functioned today only as a refuelling stop for the Indian-Pacific). We rejoined the other Trans-Australian line - the north-south line linking Adelaide with Darwin for The Ghan rail service) later that evening outside Tarcoola, and woke up on Tuesday morning just in time to roll into Adelaide's suburbs for a 0720hrs arrival at the city's Parklands Terminal just east of the CBD. Many of us took another off-train excursion: this one had us motor around central Adelaide on a coach (I'd driven through Adelaide plenty of times previously, but it was nice to see not much had changed in the last 10 years), before visiting Mount Lofty in the south-eastern suburbs, for a lovely look over central Adelaide and its beaches along the St. Vincent's Gulf from its lookouts, 700m above sea level. We started rolling again at 1030hrs - the train had changed alignment and the locomotives had swapped ends, so those arriving into Adelaide "backwards" (like myself) were now travelling "forwards" this time - with a change of crew and a few new guests joining the service at its halfway point. We stopped briefly at Broken Hill - long enough for another off-train excursion to visit the Miner's Memorial (sitting 55m above the city along the Line of Lode mining dumps that traversed the city: it gave a lovely aerial look over the city and railway station and we were treated to jam and scones in the adjacent store) - before crossing central New South Wales during the night and waking up just in time to arrive and Bathurst and wind our way through the Blue Mountains, eventually arriving at Sydney on Wednesday.
The landscape changed as well: from the stretches of the north-eastern suburbs of Perth; to sandy and rocky travelling across southern Western Australia; to flat, low-lying scrub outside Cook; to parched, deep-orange/dark-red earth with the occasional plant or bush as we traversed across the Nullarbor Plain; to the occasional dark orange wave of sand-dunes through Woomera near Tarcoola; to yellow, shimmering grain-fields east of Adelaide outside Peterborough; to the woodland peaks of the Blue Mountains as the train wound its way into western Sydney. Occasionally we spotted wildlife as the landscape rolled by: wild kangaroos bounding away near the WA/SA border some distance before arriving in Cook, and wild emu dashing along fields in eastern South Australia some distance before Broken Hill; most of the trip was under brilliant blue skies without a single cloud to see, with temperatures around 25-30deg outside, and the full moon was out as well, brightly illuminating the evenings as we trundled over the desert. To realise that we were the only major fixture trundling through this desolate corner of the country - reinforced by the countless times I looked out the window only to be greeted with a flat landscape stretching far into the horizon without any structures (houses, power-poles, or fences), hills or mounds, or even trees, broken only by the occasional rutted, gravel road crossing the railway or briefly running alongside it - was truly astounding; this train was, at many times, the sole collection of humanity in the area. It reminded me very much of the Trans-Siberian Railway, so many months ago it seemed to me, winding its way through the Siberian forests and hills, with barely any signs of civilisation along the way. And to be honest, it had also reawakened, deep inside me, just how much I had missed this desolate, orange Australian landscape. I had loved travelling across rural and remote Australia behind the wheel when I was younger, working my way through as a contractor or just going on walkabout, before I relocated to Europe; I was glad to see it again as I slowly trundled east across the continent, and as odd as it sounds I saw it as the best way my homeland could have welcomed me back.
After breakfast on the train Wednesday morning, we wound ourselves through the Blue Mountains, trundled through suburban Sydney (where we were delayed arriving for 2.5hrs when, descending from the Blue Mountains, we lost one of our MotorRail cars at the end of the train! Too damaged to re-attach, we had to leave it behind and fetch a locomotive later to retrieve it seperately), and finally arrived at Sydney Terminal after noon on Wednesday. I had finally completed the epic 4400km trip by rail from one coast of Australia to the other....now my second trans-continental rail trip I had done this journey!
Thankfully once I arrived in Sydney proper everything began to slow down. I had booked a serviced apartment in central Sydney, about 15min walk from Sydney Terminal, at the southern end of Kent Street: once checked in, I found myself in a decent studio room 42 floors up with a fantastic view of Darling Harbour and the southern CBD. Over the next 3 days, I walked around Sydney - doing the usual tourist things, like visiting the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, walking down Pitt Street and the Strand Arcade - and generally tried to acclimatise back into an Australian headspace. It was more difficult than I expected: of course, I was surrounded by Australian accents making my own stand out even more. What the big adjustment turned out to be was the price of everything: even going food-shopping for Wednesday night's dinner (yay studio apartments with kitchenettes, my first home-cooked meal in aaaaages!), I was astonished at how much the price for pretty much everything had rocketed upwards; I had a little cash left over from the conversion from pounds Sterling, but it did not cover even close to what I had expected, even with a favourable exchange rate. Even after three days in Sydney, it still hasn't caught up to me I'm back in Australia: it feels like more of an extended holiday back in a country I'd previously visited. I don't think I'll even begin to adjust until I finally arrive in Melbourne and stop moving after so long.
Getting around Sydney posed its usual difficulties: I had last been in Sydney over 10 years ago, and while central Sydney hadn't changed much, their public transport system certainly had, with everything rebranded and using new names; but using it to meet an old English friend of mine - someone I used to work with in Claranet many years ago, who emigrated back to Australia with the wife and kids nearly three years earlier....he might even help me get a job here! - wasn't too difficult. And Friday night was the usual riot of people and traffic in central Sydney, so I elected to stay in and catch up on Australian TV....which is just as crap as it usually was (hurrah at least for ABC and SBS is all I'll say), but unexpectedly stayed up later than I thought when Rage on ABC came on: ye Gods, it's been years since I last able to watch that!
So now it's come down to this: my last flight in the 4 months I've been travelling, the short domestic hop from Sydney to Melbourne, my former home-town. I'm finally flying back to the family after all this time....it feels surreal! Four months travel, and nearly 10 years away, is finally drawing to a close. My flight departs from Sydney airport in about 3hrs, so I'd best sign out and get going.
This entry was originally posted at http://mnemonia.dreamwidth.org/342501.html. Comments may be left on either entry.
After a surprisingly-quick process going through Immigration (thankfully an Australian passport most likely helped) and retrieving my rucksack quickly (and not even stopped by AQIS to my great surprise: each time I've flown internationally into Melbourne and Sydney, the Quarantine guards they at least x-rayed my baggage!), I visited an ATM and then passed some mobile GSM provider stands in the Arrivals section, and after a few minutes comparing PAYG/no-contract plans eventually bought an Optus SIM and $30 starter pack, registered on their network, and was allocated a new Australian mobile number (which I needed: Dodo stupidly lost my old Australian mobile number two years ago when they unilaterally torpedoed my sleeper plan account without even bothering to contact me, to which I'm still somewhat annoyed, as I was quite happy with my old mobile number thankyou very much!). It was a quick walk to the taxi rank from there, and 25min and $45 later arrived in the Travelodge hotel in central Perth.
I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Perth's CBD/inner city district, enjoying the sun without the cloying humidity for the first time in a long time (28deg, finally a dry heat!).....until I passed a Woolworths and the urge to stock up on some Australian snackfoods was too strong (Burger Rings! Tim Tam biscuits! Cheezels! Chicos!). Central Perth was a nice place to walk around, but apart from the weather the other thing I had to adjust to was the language: it had been quite some time since I had walked in a country that used English as a default language. Also there was the accent: having travelled with a few Australians in my epic trip I had gotten used to the Aussie drawl from a few travel buddies.....but now I was deluged by Aussie accents, and it surprised me by how much I had to retrain my ears to adjust to it. I hadn't been surrounded by Australian accents since the last time I was here, over 3.5 years ago, for my sister's wedding in Melbourne. It only made my accent - decidedly British in comparison - stand out all the more!
Eventually walking around most of central Perth and it's attractions, I later decided to catch a Transperth local train 30min to Fremantle, perched where the Swan River emptied out into the Indian Ocean, and spent the last part of the afternoon and the evening there, discovering the lovely architecture: it reminded me a lot of Williamstown in Melbourne. After wandering along its streets and parklands, I had dinner there and eventually caught a train back into central Perth.
Sunday was the next major leg of travel: after checking out of the hotel (at 1000hrs, virtually a sleep-in by recent standards), I walked to the local station with the rucksack and daypack and caught the train for a short ride to East Perth, arriving at 1035hrs. Sitting there elegantly in its own platform was the 20-carriage Indian-Pacific train, nearly 600m long, consisting of silver Pullman carriages from the United States, dating from the 1980s and rebuilt and refurbished to Australian gauge and standards by Comeng. Boarding started at 1055hrs, and we eventually departed East Perth station on time an hour later at 1155hrs.
As I had paid for my Indian-Pacific ticket months ago, I had taken advantage of a 25% discount for full payment 6 months before departure, which had allowed me to upgrade to a Gold Class sleeper cabin of my own (instead of a Red Class seat sleeper). My cabin was a little cramped, but I had my own private space, with a comfy seat next to a fold-down table; the seat extended into a single bed which was actually quite comfortable (and, to my surprise, was actually long enough to accommodate me....just!). I had a fold-away sink, power-point and plenty of compartments for personal items and clothes. This was important: my rucksack had to be squared away seperately in the baggage wagon, usually locked and not accessible during the trip, so I needed a change of clothes in my daypack I could bring with me amongst other things for the 4 days I would be living on the train. Other Gold carriages accommodated full seating for two people that folded out into dual-level bunks, with the odd Gold Superior cabin that featured actual double-beds.
Our end (the Gold class section) featured its own lounge carriage - which I spent some time in over the next four days, enjoying a drink and reading, or just chatting with other travellers and enjoying the incredible view outside the windows - and the Queen Adelaide restaurant, the dedicated dining carriage with silver service and an exceptional menu (beef, lamb, kangaroo, barramundi, and poached salmon were just some of the offerings on the menu for lunch and dinner). As a Gold ticket-holder, I was entitled to three meals a day in the restaurant car and unlimited drinks, although if I wanted hard liquor or champagne I had to pay extra for it; I got reacquainted with Coopers Pale Ale and Crown Lager very quickly! Most of the other travellers I got to know over the following 4 days, either sitting in the lounge or over the lunch/dinner table, were mostly retired, older Australian passengers travelling for the most part all the way to Sydney (with a few leaving at Adelaide). There were some Australian families - mum, dad and the kids travelling in the one compartment - and a few older tourists - I came across a few Brits and Canadians - but oddly not many other younger tourists like myself; I supposed the price and time needed to travel in this way tended to point more to the older traveller.
The service stopped from time to time: we slowly trundled east across the southern part of Western Australia, passing through Northam and Southern Cross through Sunday afternoon and stopped briefly in Kalgoorlie later that evening (with a brief off-train excursion around the deserted streets and to Kalgoorlie's Super Pit, a 3.6km-wide open-cut gold-mine, flood-lit to allow 24hr operation since 1989), and onto the straightest part of the Trans-Australian railway - the world's longest, stretching 476km in a straight line - for a 20min stop-over at noon on Monday in Cook (originally a small town of 200 with its own hospital, virtually abandoned when the railway was privatised in 1997 and functioned today only as a refuelling stop for the Indian-Pacific). We rejoined the other Trans-Australian line - the north-south line linking Adelaide with Darwin for The Ghan rail service) later that evening outside Tarcoola, and woke up on Tuesday morning just in time to roll into Adelaide's suburbs for a 0720hrs arrival at the city's Parklands Terminal just east of the CBD. Many of us took another off-train excursion: this one had us motor around central Adelaide on a coach (I'd driven through Adelaide plenty of times previously, but it was nice to see not much had changed in the last 10 years), before visiting Mount Lofty in the south-eastern suburbs, for a lovely look over central Adelaide and its beaches along the St. Vincent's Gulf from its lookouts, 700m above sea level. We started rolling again at 1030hrs - the train had changed alignment and the locomotives had swapped ends, so those arriving into Adelaide "backwards" (like myself) were now travelling "forwards" this time - with a change of crew and a few new guests joining the service at its halfway point. We stopped briefly at Broken Hill - long enough for another off-train excursion to visit the Miner's Memorial (sitting 55m above the city along the Line of Lode mining dumps that traversed the city: it gave a lovely aerial look over the city and railway station and we were treated to jam and scones in the adjacent store) - before crossing central New South Wales during the night and waking up just in time to arrive and Bathurst and wind our way through the Blue Mountains, eventually arriving at Sydney on Wednesday.
The landscape changed as well: from the stretches of the north-eastern suburbs of Perth; to sandy and rocky travelling across southern Western Australia; to flat, low-lying scrub outside Cook; to parched, deep-orange/dark-red earth with the occasional plant or bush as we traversed across the Nullarbor Plain; to the occasional dark orange wave of sand-dunes through Woomera near Tarcoola; to yellow, shimmering grain-fields east of Adelaide outside Peterborough; to the woodland peaks of the Blue Mountains as the train wound its way into western Sydney. Occasionally we spotted wildlife as the landscape rolled by: wild kangaroos bounding away near the WA/SA border some distance before arriving in Cook, and wild emu dashing along fields in eastern South Australia some distance before Broken Hill; most of the trip was under brilliant blue skies without a single cloud to see, with temperatures around 25-30deg outside, and the full moon was out as well, brightly illuminating the evenings as we trundled over the desert. To realise that we were the only major fixture trundling through this desolate corner of the country - reinforced by the countless times I looked out the window only to be greeted with a flat landscape stretching far into the horizon without any structures (houses, power-poles, or fences), hills or mounds, or even trees, broken only by the occasional rutted, gravel road crossing the railway or briefly running alongside it - was truly astounding; this train was, at many times, the sole collection of humanity in the area. It reminded me very much of the Trans-Siberian Railway, so many months ago it seemed to me, winding its way through the Siberian forests and hills, with barely any signs of civilisation along the way. And to be honest, it had also reawakened, deep inside me, just how much I had missed this desolate, orange Australian landscape. I had loved travelling across rural and remote Australia behind the wheel when I was younger, working my way through as a contractor or just going on walkabout, before I relocated to Europe; I was glad to see it again as I slowly trundled east across the continent, and as odd as it sounds I saw it as the best way my homeland could have welcomed me back.
After breakfast on the train Wednesday morning, we wound ourselves through the Blue Mountains, trundled through suburban Sydney (where we were delayed arriving for 2.5hrs when, descending from the Blue Mountains, we lost one of our MotorRail cars at the end of the train! Too damaged to re-attach, we had to leave it behind and fetch a locomotive later to retrieve it seperately), and finally arrived at Sydney Terminal after noon on Wednesday. I had finally completed the epic 4400km trip by rail from one coast of Australia to the other....now my second trans-continental rail trip I had done this journey!
Thankfully once I arrived in Sydney proper everything began to slow down. I had booked a serviced apartment in central Sydney, about 15min walk from Sydney Terminal, at the southern end of Kent Street: once checked in, I found myself in a decent studio room 42 floors up with a fantastic view of Darling Harbour and the southern CBD. Over the next 3 days, I walked around Sydney - doing the usual tourist things, like visiting the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, walking down Pitt Street and the Strand Arcade - and generally tried to acclimatise back into an Australian headspace. It was more difficult than I expected: of course, I was surrounded by Australian accents making my own stand out even more. What the big adjustment turned out to be was the price of everything: even going food-shopping for Wednesday night's dinner (yay studio apartments with kitchenettes, my first home-cooked meal in aaaaages!), I was astonished at how much the price for pretty much everything had rocketed upwards; I had a little cash left over from the conversion from pounds Sterling, but it did not cover even close to what I had expected, even with a favourable exchange rate. Even after three days in Sydney, it still hasn't caught up to me I'm back in Australia: it feels like more of an extended holiday back in a country I'd previously visited. I don't think I'll even begin to adjust until I finally arrive in Melbourne and stop moving after so long.
Getting around Sydney posed its usual difficulties: I had last been in Sydney over 10 years ago, and while central Sydney hadn't changed much, their public transport system certainly had, with everything rebranded and using new names; but using it to meet an old English friend of mine - someone I used to work with in Claranet many years ago, who emigrated back to Australia with the wife and kids nearly three years earlier....he might even help me get a job here! - wasn't too difficult. And Friday night was the usual riot of people and traffic in central Sydney, so I elected to stay in and catch up on Australian TV....which is just as crap as it usually was (hurrah at least for ABC and SBS is all I'll say), but unexpectedly stayed up later than I thought when Rage on ABC came on: ye Gods, it's been years since I last able to watch that!
So now it's come down to this: my last flight in the 4 months I've been travelling, the short domestic hop from Sydney to Melbourne, my former home-town. I'm finally flying back to the family after all this time....it feels surreal! Four months travel, and nearly 10 years away, is finally drawing to a close. My flight departs from Sydney airport in about 3hrs, so I'd best sign out and get going.
This entry was originally posted at http://mnemonia.dreamwidth.org/342501.html. Comments may be left on either entry.