Tracks Through the Outback

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 to. 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.

The next decision, which shall be explained soon enough, was to henceforth decline any offers of kangaroo steak.

The Ghan derives its name from the late 19th century, when Afghan camel drivers provided a key supply line up the middle of Australia, delivering mail and goods to settlers in the outback. The steam-driven train began service--the term should be used loosely--between Adelaide and Alice Springs in August 1929.

In its early days the train ran on narrow-gauge tracks but switched to broad-gauge in places. It was assaulted regularly by sand drifts and, because it was built through a flood plain, sudden washouts. It quickly won a well-deserved reputation for unreliability. As recently as 1963, 200 passengers had to be airlifted from the train after it became mired in mud, Australian rail historian Basil Fuller says.

The new system is more reliable and elaborate, and runs on standard-gauge tracks. After a few days in Sydney, I saw it as a chance to see the center of Australia 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 their 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.

The line’s tracks are due to be extended north from Alice Springs to Darwin in the Northern Territory by 2001, but tourism officials say passengers on that route are unlikely before 2003.

I flew into Adelaide from Sydney and spent a few hours investigating the city’s placid downtown streets before catching a taxi to the small, uninteresting Keswick Passenger Rail Terminal. (My favorite discovery: Near Adelaide lies a historic beachfront suburb named Glenelg, which backward spells Glenelg.)

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 lower classes. The adult fare is $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. (These prices are in effect through March 31.)

After dropping my bag in an ingeniously adaptable one-man compartment (about 4 feet by 7 feet), I headed for the lounge car, where I sought to separate myself from the American tour group whose members kept calling Adelaide “Adoline.”

The strategy worked. Though train employees say Australians are usually a minority of the travelers in first class, I managed to hook up with a fascinating group of them. One, a nurse named Michelle Koerner, had lived in Alice Springs on and off for a dozen years. The couple with her were longtime friends of hers, Marina and Paul Bakker of Melbourne, and they had decided to take jobs in Alice Springs. Marina was going to be a counselor at the high school, Paul a manager of government-subsidized housing. Together we listened as Michelle spun outback tales.

“My mother was stationed in Alice Springs during the war,” she told us. “She used to get off the train and stretch her legs a bit, have a walk. And then she’d get back on . . . while it was rolling. The train was that slow.”

Eventually it was dinner time, and instead of scanning the flat landscape, I could retrain my gaze on the white tablecloth, where, improbably and impeccably, a waiter soon placed pumpkin crab meat soup. Then Caesar salad. Then (vegetarians, turn away now) 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, we spotted a live 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, they were far enough off that I didn’t have to look in their eyes.

T hat night, over beers in the lounge car, came more tales of the outback and, Michelle being a nurse, stories of outback medicine.

“We used to have a trunk with 20 rolls of toilet paper,” Michelle began, pausing to build curiosity. “If there was an accident, you’d douse them with kerosene and light them, use them as flares. That’s the bush.”

It sounded to me as if the bush might be a fire hazard.

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.

In this vast region, humans (about 178,000) are outnumbered by sheep (Australia leads the world in wool production) and rivaled by kangaroos, dingoes and leftover Afghan camels. The Northern Territory covers 519,800 square miles, nearly twice the size of Texas. It’s been less than 60 years since the first paved highway connected Alice Springs with Darwin to the north. And it was only in the mid-1980s that the paved highway from Adelaide to Alice Springs went through.

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

It was a fascinating ride, as much for the company as for the scenery. But I did not hunger for more. I stepped off the train convinced I need not save my pennies to try Australia’s other famous train route--the 65-hour, 2,720-mile Indian Pacific, which crosses the continent between Sydney and Perth. In one stretch--said to be the longest dead-straight section of rail line on the planet--the train rushes 300 unbending miles across the Nullarbor Plain. 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 feet 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.

All of these sites had wonderfully Australian names--Simpsons Gap, Standley Chasm, Ellery Creek Bighole--and despite the summer heat, around 95 degrees, I did some tramping around.

At Simpsons Gap, a still pool curled around the base of a mountain. At Standley Chasm, you stroll through a narrow cleavage between two great red rock faces. And at Ellery Creek Bighole--”our Riviera,” Michelle Koerner had called it--a deep, year-round pool lay half concealed by foothills and gum trees.

These were mere tastes of the wild desert that surrounds Alice. For anyone who has come this far, the next logical step is the 270-mile flight or drive west to the leading icon of the outback, Ayers Rock.

I nosed around town a little too. Using the American Southwest as a reference point--inevitable, given the nearby red rocky mountains--it seemed part Sedona, Ariz., part truck stop and part Indian reservation.

You find 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. First named Stuart (for the explorer who blazed an overland trail north), the town was born in the 1870s, when settlers were stringing the first telegraph line to connect southern Australia with Darwin in the north.

The settlement was renamed in honor of Alice Todd, wife of telegraph line construction manager Charles Todd. It gained more fame with the publication of Nevil Shute’s 1956 novel “A Town Like Alice,” and subsequent film and PBS serial versions of the book, a World War II-era love story set in Malaya and Australia. Locals call the town “The Alice.”

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. (The Papunya Tula Artists gallery on Todd Street and Jukurrpa Artists on Leichhardt Terrace seemed to offer especially strong selections of arts and crafts.)

Aborigines, who have lived in the area for at least 22,000 years and 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. I watched a knot of Aborigines resting and joking under shade trees on the fringe of town, and I was panhandled once or twice near the Todd Tavern (which features a drive-through liquor store) but didn’t manage a single real conversation with an Aborigine.

I did have a “creative native Australian” dinner at the Red Ochre Grill (filet of barramundi, a popular Australian fish) on Todd Mall; an atmospheric after-dinner Australian lager (Hahn Premium) at Scotty’s Tavern, where the walls were lined with grainy photos of pioneers from decades past and four tables were occupied by four sullen men; and a good night’s sleep at the Alice Springs Resort. If I had the trip to do again, I might begin in Sydney or Melbourne--more varied coastal landscape to start with--and I might continue from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock 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 the old stone telegraph office, where white settlers got their first toehold in the 1870s. Now run by the government as a historic site, the buildings stand next to the modest desert springs--or billabong, if you speak Australian--of the city’s name.

When I stepped inside, I got zoology instead of history.

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. OK, I thought. Maybe fish for dinner tonight.

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GUIDEBOOK

Getting Into the Outback

Getting there: Air New Zealand and Qantas offer connecting service from L.A. to Sydney with round-trip fares beginning at $1,158. Both will offer a fare of $799 for travel from April 17 to Aug. 23; tickets must be purchased by May 31. Using the Qantas Boomerang program, a one-way fare between Sydney and Adelaide costs about $155. Ansett Australia has a similar program.

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

Where to stay: The Alice Springs Resort, tel. 011-61-8- 8952-6699, fax 011-61-8-8953-0995, Internet https://www.travelaustralia.com.au/s/21134/, offers 108 units, large pool, central location and kitchenettes. Rates: $92-$122 double, breakfast included.

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

For more information: Australian Tourist Commission, tel. (800) 369-6863, fax (661) 775-4448, Internet https://www.australia.com.