Chugging into the Northern Territory

By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS, Los Angeles Times

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

The vast interior of Australia, huge and stark, lends itself to train travel; a trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs on the Great Southern Railway is filled with surprises.

ALICE SPRINGS, Australia -- The Ghan is a 970-mile stretch of railroad tracks between Adelaide in southern Australia and Alice Springs, smack-dab in the middle of the country. By the time I finished my trip, a comfortable way to see the notoriously harsh interior of the continent, and inspected my destination, I'd made two life decisions in the 19 hours of the ride.

The first came just a few hours out of the station in Adelaide, which sits along Australia's south coast. Gradually the foliage fell away, the horizon flattened and the size and starkness of the Australian outback became clear. Somewhere between Mallala and Coonamia, I mentioned to an Australian fellow passenger that it looked mighty flat out there.

"Gets flatter," she said.

And so it seemed. Mile after mile, we squinted at red earth and deep blue sky, the occasional acacia tree stitching the two together like panels on a vast two-hue quilt. In all future travel articles, I vowed, I would stop using the words "epic" and "barren" so lightly.

After a few days in Sydney, I saw the train ride as a chance to see the center of Australia while insulated from the elements but not isolated from Australians.

The train leaves Adelaide at 3 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays. Visitors also can board in Melbourne on Wednesdays, then roll 1,477 miles over 36 hours via Adelaide to Alice Springs. Early last year, mindful of the Olympic Games and the foreign tourist boom due this summer, the train's operators, Great Southern Railway, added a weekly Sydney train. It leaves Sydney on Sundays, covering 1,771 miles over 45 hours.

I flew into Adelaide from Sydney and spent a few hours investigating the city's placid downtown streets. At 3 p.m. the train doors opened, conductors hollered, a few dozen backpackers lurched toward the cheap seats, and I went looking for my compartment.

The train operates on a strict class system: In first class you get a sleeper compartment. It includes a foldaway toilet and washbasin, and all meals in a dining car sequestered from the other classes. The adult fare during my trip was $377 between Adelaide and Alice Springs.

In "holiday" class you get a sleeper compartment for $246 (toilets down the hall) and pay extra for meals from Cafe Matilda. And in coach class you get a reclining seat for $120 and pay extra for meals from Cafe Matilda.

[Times art: Teresanne Cossetta]

After dropping my bag in an ingeniously adaptable one-person compartment (about 4 feet by 7 feet), I headed for the lounge car.

By dinner time I was able to shift my gaze from the landscape and focus on the white tablecloth, where, improbably and impeccably, a waiter soon placed pumpkin crab meat soup. Then Caesar salad. Then (vegetarians, turn away) kangaroo steak. The steak was gamy but good. All the meals and service on the train, in fact, were good.

Soon after dinner, with the sun dipping low, passengers spotted a creature hopping about on the plains. Then another and another. Five kangaroos. Each halted on two legs to regard us as we rumbled past. Fortunately, the animals were far enough off that I didn't have to look into their eyes.

Most of Australia's 18-million residents live near the coasts, leaving the country's interior largely empty. The Northern Territory, into which we were rumbling, is the dry, raw land in the middle of all that big emptiness.

It was 10 a.m. by the time we reached Alice Springs. Dawn had begun at 6, a slow, yellow-red spectacle that flooded my tiny sleeping compartment with light. That morning there had been camel and dingo sightings and the appearance of the Macdonnell Ranges, the mountains that run west from Alice Springs.

I stepped off the train convinced I need not try Australia's other famous train route -- the 65-hour, 2,720-mile Indian Pacific, which crosses the continent between Sydney and Perth. Too epic. Too barren.

I didn't have much time in Alice Springs -- just a night at the cool, comfortable Alice Springs Resort and a flight out to Ayers Rock the next day -- but I wanted to see what I could.

In a rental car, I zipped past the dry Todd River, which early each autumn is home of the much-celebrated Henley-on-Todd Regatta. For the occasion, scores of Alice residents create colorful, bottomless ersatz boats that "sail" on wheels or the feet of their occupants across the sand. There's no water at this regatta, but I understand there's plenty of beer.

From the riverside, I headed out on Larapinta Drive, first to the Alice Springs Desert Park, a 525-acre collection of flora and fauna that opened in 1997 with more than 320 plant species and 120 animal species; it deserved more time than I had to give it. Beyond it, strung along Namatjira Drive over 30 miles or so, lay a handful of slightly wilder sites at the edge of the west Macdonnell Ranges.

I nosed around Alice Springs a little, too. There I found a handful of museums, the 1909 jail, the headquarters of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (still providing medical care to remote locales) and a handful of other well-baked buildings from early in the 20th century.

Alice Springs is no longer the outpost that many imagine. From 700 residents in 1939, it has reached 26,000 today, serving as base camp for outback travelers and a headquarters for the selling of Aboriginal artworks.

(Aborigines, who served as cowboys in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, still gather here. But after many decades of government discrimination and mutual misunderstanding between Aborigines and whites, there's little interaction.)

If I had the trip to do again, I'd make the 270-mile trek from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock, the leading icon of the Outback, by car instead of plane, with a few days added for hiking, maybe even sleeping out. That way I'd be drawing steadily closer to that red earth.

But it would be wrong to change anything about the most memorable stop at the end of my journey on the Ghan.

It was inside an old stone telegraph office, where white settlers got their first toehold in the 1870s. The place is now run by the government as a historic site.

When I stepped inside, I learned that the park service's desk clerk had taken to raising orphans on the job. Orphaned kangaroos, that is, found in the wild. She kept a pair by the counter, swaddled in mail pouches, their large, blinking eyes just visible.

The clerk explained that one was named Messy, the other Malau, that they were about 6 months old, and that for the next six months, in a weak approximation of motherly care, they'd be spending 20-plus hours a day in their mail pouches.

Now, I know kangaroos are no endangered species. But when I offered a finger, Messy grabbed it with a hand-like forepaw. Okay, I decided. Maybe fish for dinner tonight.

If you go

Getting on the Ghan: The U.S. booking agent for the Ghan is ATS Tours: call (310) 643-0044, fax (310) 643-0032, Web site http://www.gsr.com.au.

Where to stay: The Alice Springs Resort offers 108 units, large pool, central location and kitchenettes. Call 011-61-8-8952-6699, fax 011-61-8-8953-0995, Web site http://www.travelaustralia.com.au/s/21134/

Where to eat: Red Ochre Grill in Todd Mall, Alice Springs, local tel. 8950-6666, fax 8952-7829. Entrees $11-$15.

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