On the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth, day one and two

Days one and two, from Sydney to Adelaide, now going via Melbourne

I wake up several times in the second half of my first night on the train, each time expecting to remove my sleeping mask and find it light out.  But every time, the situation remains unchanged; the sky is still a pale indigo, perhaps from the coastal towns between Sydney and Melbourne rather than the rising sun, and I am just perpetually destined to think it is those moments immediately before dawn.

In one of those waking moments: a few dots of light scattered across the lower horizon.  Assuming them stars at first, I wonder if I have ever in my life seen these particular ones.  Like the Southern Cross and the North Star, there are some celestial bodies that remain fixed in one or the other hemisphere, and short of the two mentioned, I know not which they are.

Studying a particularly bright, red-rimmed star further, I then wonder whether they aren’t actually satellites, planets, alien spaceships, or drones.  I wonder if people create contemporary mythologies like this in Australia.  Do they have the lizard people here?  And, what if the Pleiades are unique to the northern hemisphere?  Then where would the lizard people reside?

The train jerks forward again, we blast past a bright red train crossing light, and I, blinded momentarily, choose to pull the mask back down, with hopes of receding into the old rickety dreamland that had brought me scattered nightmares of orgies in overcrowded hostel dorm rooms.

I am on the Indian Pacific, the train that runs the 4,325 kilometers from Sydney to Perth, with seldom a stop – just in Broken Hill, Adelaide, Cook, and Kalgoorlie.

What possessed me to do this?  I had heard both that it is “a great way to see the country,” and “hell on wheels.”  I paid attention to the former, brushed off the latter, and came at the trip with stubbornly eager eyes, considering it a prelude to the Trans-Siberian.

As it neared, the downsides I had read about in Bill Bryson’s book and on the fear-mongering Thorn Tree began to get to me.  During the preceding six days I spent in Sydney and environs, I voiced my nervousness to several different Aussies.  They all unfailingly responded in that chipper Aussie way: “Great journey ahead of you,” or “It’ll be a marvelous trip.”

One quickly comes to suspect that, in Australia, “chipper” is a cultural norm, but not necessarily a truth.

Truthfully, I was quite nervous.  I had just started to feel settled in Sydney, was staying on the beach at a friend of a friend’s, and had spent the last five out of six days entirely out of doors, either reclining at Bondi and Manly, on a motorbike up to Palm Beach and the Barrenjoey Lighthouse, or tramping up and down the cliff faces of the Jamison Valley in the Blue Mountains.

The goal in Australia had been to detox from office life by spending as much time outside and disconnected from technology as possible.

Upon entering the red day/nighter seat carriage of the Indian Pacific, I find something like the opposite: the metal walls close in on me, and the seat, while one of the most comfortable and deepest reclining seats a train could have, cages me in with its thick arms.  My saving grace is the empty seat next to me, into which I stretch my legs.

I suspiciously eye each person that enters the train, wondering if they’ll be my seat mate.  I can’t handle not knowing, and as more people come and find their seats away from me, I think the universe is fucking with me, because it knows my nerves are already high.

Four women get settled in to the seats across from me: a young girl of maybe six, her mother, who looks much older than is possible, with the very thesis of weather beaten leathery skin, the grandmother, presumably, and then a fourth woman, with dyed mahogany hair, who must be an aunt.  They have just spent the easter holidays in Brisbane, and are on their way home to Broken Hill (the girl and the mother) and Adelaide (the other two).

Usually, the train would head west from Sydney, through Lithgow and Bathhurst in the Blue Mountains, and onward to Broken Hill, arriving there at six in the morning.  But there is an obstruction of some sort on the track and so we are traveling south, along the Overland’s route, via Melbourne, and then onward to Adelaide, due to arrive there at 7pm that first full day on the train, only four hours behind schedule.

As soon as we’re out of the station, the man in the seat behind me begins to eek out a text message on his very old flip phone.  I put earplugs in, to quiet the chatterbox ladies, this text message, and the general creek and grunt of the train on its tracks.

It doesn’t work.  Every time he strickes a key, the high pitched beep pierces through my earplugs and knocks me apart from the sentences I’m trying to read.  I can do nothing but fume silently and think about how this is not the way to start a three day trip.

Beepbeepbeep, beepbeep, beepbeepbeep, beep.  It is a familiar morse code, circa 2003.  It iss the text message equivalent of hunting and pecking at the keyboard.  In each series of beeps, you can hear the letter he is looking for: the third on the keypad, the second, the third, the first.  The whole scene is painful: I long to teach him predictive text and I keep thinking to ask him to turn the sound indicator off, but I hold my tongue.  He must be just about done.

Here’s something funny I’ve noticed: Australians rarely say “Excuse me” when someone is in their way.  This I noticed early on, and have been trying to figure out what they do instead ever since.  I believe what happens is that they don’t need the word.  When someone is in the way, an Australian will wait for that person to move.  Quite often, though, this is unnecessary, because the person in the way is actually attuned to how they are affecting those around them, notices they might be obstructing someone’s way, and moves before any “excuse me” is truly warranted.

I try desperately to cultivate this Australian sentiment as the single text message enters its fifteenth minute.

The woman from Broken Hill has taken all this diversion-through-Melbourne stuff well, and has chosen for her daughter and herself to stay on with their relatives.  She was in fact quite obliging about the re-routing eight hours south of their intended destination.  She kept saying, “Ay, well, the Indian Pacific is never on time.  Can’t expect it to be.”

The grandmother of the group put out four identical calls within the first hour to share this unsurprising news with relatives or friends: “Oh, yehs, having a marvelous time…. Noy, noy, the train was late going up to Brisbane, we got back to Sydney three hours late… Yehs, diversion through Melbourne, we’ll see the country.  We’re having a brilliant time.”

Beepbeepbeep.  I put down my book; progress is futile.  I lean over to the woman from Broken Hill to ask what she will do and how far is Broken Hill from Adelaide anyway.

“Oh, I’ll have a friend come pick me ehp.  It’s only a—“ she thinks quite long and hard at this point—“six or eight hour drive.”

Her face is thick with years of sun.  She is missing one or more of her upper incisors.  The rest are so crooked you’d think her British.

“They won’t put you on a coach?” I ask.  A “coach” is a “bus”.

“Noy, noy, I’ll ‘ave me friend come pick me up.”

This thing – this “it’ll all work out just fine” – is another Australian sentiment I try to cultivate as the text message proceeds into its seventeenth minute.  I begin to wonder whether it is a text message at all.  Maybe it will never stop.  Maybe he is surfing the web on his old phone.  Or, composing a tune.  He does have a mandolin with him.

The American in me wins out and I finally turn around.  The man’s face is scrunched in deep thought.  Every keystroke taxes his brow.

I say, “Excuse me.”  Nothing.  “Could I—“ I venture.  His wife notices me – she’s a bleached-hair smoker quite horrified that we won’t be able to get off the train for more than twenty-four hours.

“Would you mind turning the sound off?”

He looks up.  “Oh, is it bothering you?”

How could it not be?  Is what I’d like to shout.  Haven’t you noticed the volume of the sound?  This insistent patter?  All I want to do is read, I silently plead.  To him, I flash a kind grin and say, “It is a bit distracting.”

His wife excuses him: “Oh he’s just writing a text to the people we stayed with.  He’s almost finished.”

I smile politely and tuck back into my book.  It’s true, within five minutes, the poking at keys stops.

The six year old girl from Broken Hill is setting up her dolls and stuffed animals at her mother’s feet.  She will eventually sleep on the floor, on a blanket with her pillow.  The mother is having a conversation over the seat with her fellow traveling mates.  It is about nothing at all, and this time I want to ask them if they know how to turn the seats around.  To think, you could talk facing each other if you wished.  Instead, I put my earplugs back in.

In the morning, the four women wake up with the sun and before everyone else in the car has even arisen, they are again conversing over the seats, which forces them to speak quite loudly if they are to hear each other.  The one with the monochrome dye job opens a two liter bottle of nuclear red soda and swigs from it to wash down a pill of sorts.  I immediately tidy myself up and leave for the lounge car, where I am now, drinking a latte and watching a man with a crooked ponytail and similarly poor dental health eat his breakfast in a quite proper fashion.  He eats with a knife in his right and a fork in his left, tines down, pushing each bite tidily together, before it moves to his mouth.  When it arrives there, it is ingested with a whoosh of air, as if a burp but backwards.  It is all I can do to not heave.

Most of these people are actually getting off in Adelaide, moving on to cruises along the Murray River, or just plain going home.  The first day actually ends up being quite pleasant.  Two free cups of coffee and a shower perk me up. Then I end up joking around with the text messager’s wife and make friends with the through-passengers to Sydney, including Silke from Austria who has been traveling for eight months and has already been on the Trans-Siberian, Axelle the French journaliste, and an older couple whose names I never learn.  They told me all about riding the Trans-Siberian in 1984.