2005

In 1929 the Ghan first linked the genteel sandstone city of Adelaide on the south coast of Australia to Alice Springs in the country's red center, a distance of almost 1,600 kilometers, or 1,000 miles. After many false starts over the next 75 years, the rail line was finally extended to Darwin in the "top end," actually closer to Singapore than any other Australian metropolis, at a cost of 1.3 billion Australian dollars, or $978 million.

The first train to undertake the 2,900-kilometer Ghan trip from Adelaide to Darwin ran in February last year. This is the longest north-south train journey on the last great transcontinental train track to be laid in the world.

As an Australian who lives in a city on the coast, I wanted to see for myself the expanse of the outback that figures so prominently in our national image. And what better way to do it than via this "nation building" feat of engineering that links the southern and northern coasts of Australia.

And so one bright spring November day last year, I started my journey at Adelaide's red brick Keswick Terminal. Holding my Gold Kangaroo ticket, I asked one of the attendants waiting outside the carriage doors where my cabin was located. (Gold Kangaroo carriages are essentially first-class and Red Kangaroo ones second-class.) The train I was traveling on was more than a kilometer long and able to carry up to 550 passengers and cruise an average of 80 kilometers an hour.

Gold Kangaroo class has a hospitality attendant for each carriage of nine cabins. My attendant, Kathy, gave a rundown of all the amenities of my double cabin, which had a faintly retro feel, understandably since the fully refurbished rolling stock is 35 years old. Three seats stretched across the cabin to a small fold-down table in front of the expansive picture window, and two narrow cupboards perched either side of a mirror. In the ingeniously designed bathroom closet were a shower head and a fold-down sink and toilet.

As we left Adelaide, just about every person stopped to watch and wave.

As I made my way to the lounge car, I half expected to see Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant leaning nonchalantly in one of the corridors watching the sun set fast over golden wheat fields. Instead, I was "assaulted by the monstrously typical," as Paul Theroux observed in "The Great Railway Bazaar." In this case, it was a gaggle of attentive, largely middle-aged travelers enjoying a glass of pink champagne while the jovial train manager, Sid Wesson, told stories of how camels carried supplies when the track was built to Alice. Today, you may spot one of the 600,000 feral camels as the train heads further into the desert spinifex.

Mealtimes are an occasion to meet fellow passengers and enjoy some first-rate food. In Gold Kangaroo class, dining is a silver service car - it is cafeteria-style in Red Kangaroo class - offering a three-course dinner with some inspired Australian gourmet touches. I enjoyed butternut pumpkin and bunya nut soup accompanied by a full-blooded Coonawarra cabernet with Sue and John, from Sussex, England.

Somewhere between the entrée and dessert, the train jerked to a stop and the fully laden waiter joked about almost delivering my meal directly to my stomach - on the outside. Sid said that we had hit a bull, and it took 20 minutes for the staff to clear the body from the track.

Eventually I wended my way back to my relatively spacious abode. My bed was now made with starched white sheets and a cozy quilt while outside my window the landscape was bathed in starlight completely unencumbered by "civilization." I fell asleep reading Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" under the patterns of the Southern Cross. Several times in the night I awoke to various rattles and jolts. The train stopped near Cooper Pedy, where some passengers disembarked to explore the world's greatest opal mines and stay, like the locals, in underground caverns.

At dawn, Kathy delivered a cup of tea and I watched a couple of kangaroos scratching for food. What I didn't see was the intricate dance between prey and predators in this land where only the most adept survive. I listened to stories on my cabin sound system about the nonindigenous pigs, cats, rabbits and foxes wreaking havoc with endangered local fauna such as the bilby (rabbit-eared bandicoot) and mala (rufous hare wallaby) marsupials.

As we neared Alice, made famous by the author Neville Shute, the rugged, red, 320 million-year-old MacDonnell Ranges thrust through the desert landscape. The Arrernte aborigines believe mythic caterpillars formed this mountain range, which were once higher than the Rockies. We cross the oldest and possibly driest river in the world, the Finke. In the shade of the river red gums and coolibah trees, along the banks, are occasional oxbow billabongs, sacred sites that are each a chapter in a particular aboriginal dreamtime story, just as the ballad "Waltzing Matilda," or indeed the Ghan itself, is a verse in the European settlement of Australia.