New Ghan: from Alice Springs to Adelaide

By Jay Brunhouse

(Second of three parts on Australia, jump to part 1, part 2, part 3)

Porters bringing coffee knock on the Ghan’s cabin doors at 6 a.m. Opening the window shutters, passengers see the Australian Outback’s landscape has not changed. Flat reddish turf, occasional bushes and forests of desperate gum trees surround the Ghan on the second day of its run from Darwin to Adelaide.

It is time for a shower before breakfast. The Ghan’s bathrooms are a model of efficiency and aggravation. Arranged in a space scarcely larger than a telephone booth with stool, guests have a shower, a stainless-steel washbasin with mirror and a flush toilet that empties into nothingness by tipping up. The water is warm, and the towels are cunningly secured from the shower water in a Formica cubbyhole.

Breakfast in the dining carriage consists of fruit juice, cereal or fruit, toast, eggs (either fried or scrambled) or Belgian waffles, and coffee. Then, at 9 a.m., the Ghan halts in the capital of the outback, Alice Springs.

At Alice, the Ghan has performed a near miracle in the space of eight train hours. It carried guests from a city so moist that their clothes and accessories felt perpetually damp despite the hearty sun and delivered them to a settlement so dry and desiccated it seemed to nudge the Fahrenheit level where paper spontaneously ignites, and yet it is so popular that land prices have skyrocketed.

The center’s heart and soul

Alice Springs is a boomtown. At pop. 28,000, it is growing faster than any town in Australia — primarily due to the tourist magnetism of Ayers Rock, the red conglomerate massif beckoning 278 miles away in the middle of pancake-flat tableland.

The name Alice Springs is a misnomer. There are no springs, only a water hole with good drinking water underground. It rains about 10 inches a year in Alice, but the water evaporates so quickly that there is not a drop of surface water, and guests realize this at 9 a.m. when they visit 2-year old Desert Park for a display of 400 spinifex grasses and 120 desert mammals and birds as well as a light lunch at Madigen’s.

The underground Todd River, the Stuart highway connecting Darwin in the north and Port Augusta in the south, and the Ghan train (at
12:40 p.m.) all leave Alice Springs through Heavitree Gap, a narrow pass in the MacDonnell Ranges.

Until departure from Alice, the Ghan has been headed by two locomotives for its route through the remote Outback, but in Alice, the standby loco is left behind and the Ghan is pulled through landscape more accessible than it was by a single locomotive. The hills soon vanish in the distance and the Ghan enters a vast red desert with scrub, eucalyptuses and desert foliage and travels south on the track bed laid in 1980.

Guests see that even slight changes in elevation dramatically alter the vegetation. As the Ghan travels south, scenery varies from dense scrub to almost bare red earth, from dunes covered with spinifex to scattered strands of desert oak trees. Buttes stretching to the west are powdered with red sand and nurture eucalypts.

About 3:16 p.m. the Ghan crosses the historic Finke River on a 15-span bridge. The Finke is one of the longest rivers in Australia, although it is usually dry but with water holes. Some of the water holes are of cultural significance to the Aboriginal people.

Formerly, trains would back up and recross the bridge so train lovers could get off and photograph the train for their albums, but this custom is no longer followed because of scheduling.

Iron Man

At 3:35 p.m. the Ghan passes the famous “Iron Man,” which is a wrought-iron, abstract statue of a railroad worker. It was created and erected by gan dy dancers to celebrate their labor on Australia’s longest railroad stretch. The “Iron Man” commemorates the one-millionth concrete railroad tie laid during construction of the Tarcoola-Alice Springs line.

Guests adjust their watches as the Ghan enters the state of South Australia. Low scrub land gives way to the flat, gray Gibber plain of the Coober area.

At 5 p.m., guests gather around the bar in the lounge carriage for a reception arranged for diners hungering for their 6 p.m. Sunset Dinner. At 7 p.m., the diners waiting for the 8 p.m. Moonlight Dinner continue hearty socializing.

During the night, the Ghan passes Coober Pedy (established in 1915), where miners quarried 70%-80% of the world’s gem-quality opals.

Because of the fierce heat of the summer, miners soon discovered that their underground workplaces were considerably cooler than their camps aboveground and so began creating complete homes underground. Coober Pedy now has underground motels, shops, museums, gem displays and a church.

After the Ghan turns west at Tarcoola it passes Woomera, where a signboard signals the entrance to Australia’s vast Woomera Weapons Testing Range.

The Ghan passes Port Augusta (pop. 16,000), a major rail and road center of South Australia and a hopping-off point to the Outback, the Flinders Ranges and the Eyre Peninsula.

Some of the townspeople here keep kangaroos as pets. Roos are friendly, mix well with people, dogs and cats (and are cuter than most) and require no feeding, only a good yard in which to graze.

However, they must be adopted very young; they demolish gardens and become aggressive when older.

On to Adelaide

When guests awake on the third morning to the rapping of their porters at 6 a.m., the view is surprising. The grasslands are still straw colored, but the bushes appear unnaturally green. Sheep graze in the fields. The earth is brown, not red. Black-and-white magpies crowd upon a telephone wire. Squat grain silos mark geometric fields that are bordered by eucalypts to break the wind.

Paralleling Highway One, Ghan follows the wheat belt south to Adelaide with Spencer Gulf on its right. When guests look carefully, they are likely to see families of wild emus browsing in wheat fields.

When the Ghan slows and enters the capital city of South Australia at 9:30 in the morning, guests see Adelaide’s sports stadium, the basketball venue, and pass Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper building. Porters ready luggage for arrival at Adelaide’s Great Southern Railway’s Keswick Passenger Terminal that serves both the Ghan and the Indian Pacific, which is Australia’s east-west, coast-to-coast train.

Everyone who arrives in Adelaide loves — or at least is very fond of — Adelaide. Adelaide (pop. 1.2 million) is an extraordinarily visitor-friendly city of top-notch museums, parklands and good life.

Combined with a mild, Mediterranean climate, a laid-back lifestyle and more than 700 restaurants, cafés, pubs and wine bars, it is, according to The New Yorker magazine, “Possibly the last well-planned and contented metropolis on earth.”

Visitors can choose to eat at Italian, Asian and even Egyptian restaurants spotted along the city’s “eat streets,” such as Gouger Street (Wah Hing Restaurant), Hutt Street (Good Life Modern Organic Pizza Restaurant) and Rundle Street. The Botanic Café faces the Botanic Garden on East Terrance Drive.

I thank the South Australia Tourism Commission for arranging my March ’06 travel on the Ghan, dining, and accommodation at the 4.5-star, cutting-edge, inner-city Majestic Roof Garden Hotel (phone [08] 8100 4400 or visit www.majestichotels.com.au).

(Continue to part 3)