Into the West: Traversing the Nullarbor on the Indian Pacific

After crossing back to Adelaide on the Kangaroo Island ferry (which everyone said would be really choppy and I was worried about my seasickness-prone tendencies, but it was totally fine – am I improving?) I holed up in a cute little hostel that had free wifi and pancakes in the morning (score!). The next day I was leaving on the 6pm train to travel across the vast expanse of nothing called the Nullarbor (meaning “no trees,” and pronounced “NULL-ah-bor” or “boh,” depending on how Aussie you want to sound). I spent the morning prepping my “train bag” and my checked bags, stopping by the Central Market to get some food (every city seems to have its own magical market to enjoy, and fortunately this one ran on Thursdays). Along with sampling lots of fruit, honey, and olive oil, I watched the cheese stall people hand-stretch fresh mozzarella (pretty cool) and I sampled some hard and soft cheeses (the fresh mozza was pretty divine, but expensive). I bought a very tiny chunk of goat cheese (which turned out to be more like goat cheese brie, but it was still good) and made some sandwiches to have for dinner, along with my pre-cooked mashed potatoes (I was determined to avoid over-priced train food, even though I would be on the train for one and a half days, from 6pm on the 28^th to 9am on the 30^th, not counting the time difference that would take us 2.5 hours back).

I also managed to fit a few hours in at the South Australian Museum, although of course I wanted to have more time (I didn’t get a chance for the gallery, but one can only see so much). I think I’ve been in too many museums recently and am having trouble remembering what was at each one without the help of photos (I left my camera in the bag check area), but I think this one had a display about Antarctic explorers and some natural history exhibits about animals of the world (and Australia, of course). It also had an extensive exhibit about Aborigines so I spent a lot of time looking at the different spears, shields, boats, decorations, and other artifacts. There was kind of an overwhelming amount of items, since most of the time the displays didn’t focus on any specific regional group, but instead tried to show a range of different groups’ tools or artwork within different categories. I’m really having trouble remembering details of what I saw (the problem with not writing about things until a month after they happen), but it was cool to see and read about the different hunting materials, baskets, stonework, etc. They had several water gourds made out of kangaroo or wallaby skin, which were cool-looking and I was impressed at how they had stitched them together to make them water tight.

Along with some whale skeletons in the lobby, the other skeletally awesome part of the museum was the opal room, which had fossilized (and/or “opalized”) dinosaur skeletons from the interior regions of South Australia where they do a lot of opal mining. Not all of the bones were totally multi-coloured, but there were lots of small sections that were, which was pretty amazing to see and reminded me of the ammonite colours in the paleontology museum in Alberta. In fact I think they had a picture or two of some ammonite fossils, which was funny after learning all about them in Canada. The Opal Room was definitely worth seeing.

On the way back to the hostel I made one indulgent stop at Haigh’s, the local chocolate chain and home of the “Easter Bilby.” Every Easter Haigh’s makes chocolate bilbies and donates a portion of the profits to bilby conservation (a bilby is a large, long-eared bandicoot, which may not mean much, but basically it’s really cute, about the size of a rabbit, nocturnal, and unfortunately being over-munched by all the feral cats, dogs, and red foxes). Since it was the last real shopping day before Easter (everything would be closed for Good Friday) it was packed, but I joined the winding queue through the store and bought a dark-chocolate bilby to eat on Sunday (I also got a free sample of a chocolate egg on the way out – win!).

The hostel people were really nice and drove me the 2km to the train station, saving me an expensive bus ride, and I checked in my big bags and hung out in the lobby until the train was ready to board (they wouldn’t let me take my sleeping bag strapped on the outside of my backpack, which turned out to be a good thing because it was quite chilly on the train at night).

Because having a sleeper cabin cost over $1000, I was in the all-nighter section, which I hoped would be tolerable for sleeping two nights. It was pretty nice, actually, since there was a lot of legroom and the seats leaned back almost 180 degrees (mine was slightly slanted to the right, which made me afraid I would awkwardly lean into my elderly seatmate while sleeping, but fortunately I didn’t). By the time we left the station it was pretty much dark, so we didn’t get to see any more of the South Australian coastline and hills area behind Adelaide, which was a shame, but I enjoyed reading for a while, eating my cheese-and-jam sandwiches, and visiting the lounge car before it was prohibited (you were supposed to pay another $10 to be able hang out there, once the second day started, but I didn’t feel up to the additional expense). I read an entire reader’s digest in the lounge, which was kind of funny, since there were a few Oz-isms in it, though nothing super hilarious comes to mind.

I enjoyed peeking at the dawn the next morning in between sleeping (I actually didn’t sleep too badly), but unfortunately all my photos sort of look like this, and it was pretty cloudy so the light wasn’t as spectacular as I’d hoped.

The landscape wasn’t quite treeless, but it was generally pretty shrubby and dry, with greenish plants and very red dirt. I was super excited to see a dingo standing watching the train, he was so reddish (either from the dirt or naturally) that I almost didn’t notice him. Yay for seeing the largest (not really so I’ll put this in quotes) “native” placental mammal in the wild! (I’m going out of order, but I’d checked off a lot of the marsupials by this point, even wombats!)

I went to take a shower (which was also pretty fun on a moving train, but not uncomfortable) and who should be stepping out of the compartment but Anna, from my Great Ocean Road trip! (I know haven’t introduced her yet, but she was German and had been hoping to find harvesting work in Adelaide, but no such luck). We chatted for a bit and then went outside to wander around once the train made its only Nullarbor stop in the ghost town of Cook.

The landscape had definitely changed by this point, and even proper bushes were few and far between, with only these little scrubby plants remaining, so I had to make sure I posed in the middle of nothing.

The “town” was a bit creepy, because you could see the old school, pub, pool (long-dry), and various other buildings, and everything was pretty desolate but also kind of weird, since every week train-traveling tourists wander around it for a half hour so it has some signs and monuments that look in good condition.

We had paused while in the middle of riding the longest straight stretch of rail in the world, although I’ll have to double check how long it actually is…This mural conveniently depicted my dingo-sighting experience (minus the kangaroos in the background). 

I had expected Cook to be roiling in the sun, since it was my first experience being in a deserty and arid part of Australia (though not nearly as deserty as other parts), but it was pretty mild and overcast, which was a little disappointing. This sideline train shot should be dazzling in the sunlight, but alas, the Hogwarts Express had better lighting…

Anyway the rest of the day I alternated between reading, talking with Anna, and watching the endless flatness of the Nullarbor. It’s pretty hard to tell with these photos, but it was actually pretty colourful and relaxing to watch. All the plants were ranges of greens, yellows, purples, and blues, and then the ground was so orange and red that it made a nice contrast.

We also passed the Western Australian border, which was announced over the intercom (which was normally pretty annoying since they kept saying things like “tune into your radios for information about the Nullarbor” only the all-nighter people didn’t have personal radios, so it was little aggrieving to hear about the exciting info all the fancy sleeper people got to hear). Here’s my fleeting shot of the backwards sign on the border that presumably said “Welcome to South Australia” (we didn’t have much warning about when to take the best photo, so I missed shooting the “Welcome to Western Australia” sign, although I did see it).

Here’s a pic of a significant sheep station thing in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know anything else about it, though, since I couldn’t find the right station on my imaginary radio.

By the time sunset approached, the scenery had changed, yet again, and now there were trees, bushes, and other shrubby sclerophyll species (sclerophyll refers to the types of leaves that many trees inhabiting arid, fire-prone, and nutrient-poor environments possess. They are narrow (to minimize surface area and sun exposure), waxy (to keep from drying out), and grey-green (to reflect off sunlight) and hang vertically (also minimizing sun exposure). Some of them, like eucalypts, also emit flammable volatile oils to help the spread of fires. Sorry, that was a long botanical digression (and I broke my rule of never using parentheses within parentheses – yikes), but the point is that I was seeing lots of these plants as I traveled through the arid south of the country). The sunset and the red dirt and the greenish trees combined for some nice photos, even if the moving train prevented them from being totally in focus.

Sometime in the evening we gained an hour as we traveled west, which wasn’t in an official time zone, but was just for the purposes of the train. We stopped in Kalgoorlie for three hours in the evening (pronounced “kal-GOOL-ee,” just ignore that “r”), which is a famous gold-mining town and “the biggest city in the outback,” though it was pretty dark and silent so I couldn’t see much of it or the outback setting. Being the evening of Good Friday, nothing was open, but Anna wanted to wander around and distribute her resumes anyway, so we did a little bit of that by sliding them under the doors of a few pubs (kind of sketchy, but then it was a sketchy-feeling place). We got soft-serve at MacDonalds, but otherwise the only interesting thing about Kalgoorlie was this hilarious sign on a (closed) vet’s office.

In the morning I caught a little bit of the sunrise again, but we were traveling through farm and forest areas now, so it wasn’t as exciting as the day before. We went back the final 1.5 hours (Adelaide was a half hour earlier than Sydney and the rest of the east, and we were now a full 3 hours earlier, which made more sense) and finally arrived in Perth at about 9am. My Perth friends, Andrew and Caroline, picked me up, dropped my stuff off at the hostel, and then took me to brunch in King’s Park, the huge botanical garden (plus a whole lot of natural bushland) that’s right next to the main city. I had deluxe pancakes with tropical fruit compote (passionfruit!) and delicious mascarpone – it was beautiful! As was the view of Perth from that vantage point.

The Swan River that runs through the city kind of reminded me of Lake Union.

I learned a bit about some of the funky Western Australian plants (Caroline is a botanist) and saw this giant bottle tree that had apparently been transported from the north of the state (all the way up in the tropics, near the Kimberley region) all the way down to King’s Park because it stood in the way of some new development and they didn’t want to chop it down (if only they could have done that with Arthur’s house and the Earth!). They had photos of the Great Tree Transportation, and apparently it was the farthest overland anyone had ever driven a giant tree (at least in Australia, if not the world, either way, it’s a weird but impressive statistic and emphasizes that Western Australia is, indeed, huge!). It only looked a little worse for wear.

I was pretty exhausted after two nights on a train, and so I collapsed in my hostel that afternoon, relieved to be in Perth at last.