A traveller’s travails

I’m starting to think I’m jinxed. Not in a really bad way – I haven’t lost my job or my life savings or my best friend or my health. But I can’t help feeling I’m being put to the test: every time I leave Sydney something goes wrong.

I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty savvy traveller. I’ve visited Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Russia without encountering any calamities. While abroad I’ve never been pickpocketed, mugged, arrested or even ripped off by border guards. I’ve never lost my passport or my money, I’ve never missed a flight and I’ve never slept through my stop. (I’d be grateful if you could all touch some wood on my behalf at this point.) But Australia’s travel gods seem to have it in for me. First there was the Canberra debacle, then I nearly ended up stranded in Adelaide with nothing but the t-shirt and shorts I was wearing (story follows), now Qantas have kindly speeded up the process of replacing my wardrobe by losing my bag.

I have Crystal Palace football club to thank for not being given an unexpected opportunity to enjoy Adelaide’s famous wineries and restaurants at my leisure. I was travelling on the Indian Pacific train service between Sydney and Perth, which stops halfway at Adelaide. As this is the only major city along the route the train usually halts here for three-and-a-half hours, which is apparently just long enough to visit one of the vineyards. We were running late so only had a couple of hours, but my plans were rather less ambitious – I wanted to have a decent cup of tea and wander around the city centre. What could possibly go wrong?

Adelaide won me over very quickly. Given its “city of churches” tag (as a comedian pointed out recently, Rome might have something to say about this), I was expecting a sedate and conservative country town. But the first street I found myself in was packed with funky al fresco cafes, outdoor sports booking agents and hip clothing shops – the main hazard to pedestrians in Adelaide is posed by skateboards, not mobility scooters. Then there are the airy central squares, the wide streets and the attractive historic buildings that line North Terrace. As many proud locals told me, Adelaide is a very “liveable” city.

It was one of these historic buildings that was my undoing. I was walking along the street, wondering what had happened to all of Sydney’s 19th-century architecture and starting to think about finding a taxi. Then I arrived at Adelaide’s spectacular central railway station. After admiring the neoclassical exterior and vaulted interior, I had a bright idea: why not get a train back to the out-of-town railway terminal at Keswick where the Indian Pacific was waiting? I would save time, money and the environment by not getting a cab.

So I bought my ticket and asked a member of station staff which was the next train to Keswick. Assured it was only two stops away, I was confident I would be back onboard the Indian Pacific in plenty of time. The commuter-packed train set off rather slowly. Wondering when we would get to the first stop, I turned around to look out of the window, just in time to see Keswick station go flying past. After pausing for a moment to let this sink in, I got up and found one of the conductors and told him that his train had not stopped where it was supposed to. Given the circumstances, he was surprisingly helpful. He explained that this was an express service that would not stop until Brighton and tried unsuccessfully to phone me a cab.

Brighton is said to have a lovely beach but that wasn’t going to help me catch my train, which was leaving in 20 minutes. After leaving Adelaide, the Indian Pacific was heading west across Australia’s most barren stretch of land and would not stop for eight hours; I was unlikely to get away with putting that taxi trip on expenses. I realised I had left almost everything on board – my clothes, my computer, my passport and the phone numbers of the people organising the trip. Having ruled out hitchhiking, hotwiring and hijacking, I desperately searched my pockets for an unlikely Get Out Of Adelaide Free card. Then I found one.

The previous night I had got chatting to Joe, the reservations manager for Great Southern Railway, the Indian Pacific’s operating company. He turned out to be one of the few Australians who had heard of Dulwich, the south-east London suburb I am proud to call home. (Plenty of people have heard of Dulwich Hill, the inner-west Sydney suburb where the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, grew up.) His family was originally from the area and – more to the point – he was a huge fan of Crystal Palace FC, whose Selhurst Park ground is just a few miles down the road from my flat. Joe was the only person I swapped business cards with that night.

So I called Joe’s mobile and, via his wife, asked in my calmest voice if he could pass the message onto the Indian Pacific crew that Sam had accidentally found himself in Brighton and might possibly be a bit late for the train. I thought this might buy me a couple of minutes while I invented matter teleportation.

Then, as I stood outside Brighton station trying to persuade myself that miracles do happen, a car pulled up and a man bundled me into the back. Happy to be going anywhere, I didn’t protest, and it took me a few moments to realise that Joe had come to rescue me. He had happened to be in the area picking up his mother, a transplanted Londoner, when I called. Because all his family was in the car, the only place where I could fit was in the boot.

So here I was crammed into the back of the car, squeezed around a pushchair, keeping my head low so the police wouldn’t stop us, panicking about whether the train would leave without me, having a polite conversation with a charming grandmother about the relative merits of East London and South Australia (South Australia won). It was pretty surreal.

Needless to say, I made the train with five minutes to spare, and the first beer went down pretty quickly. Thank you Joe.

Qantas’s efforts to derail my trip are rather more mundane. Overnight on Friday I flew back from Darwin, where I had been covering the appeal of the man convicted of murdering British backpacker Peter Falconio. The flight landed in Sydney at 6am but my rucksack didn’t. The Qantas baggage staff have been extremely helpful - and polite, even after my 20th phone call - but so far they haven’t managed to trace my bag. So it looks like I’m going to be wearing trainers into work today.

Keeping it rail

This is a (slightly rushed) travel feature about a press trip from Sydney to Perth by rail I went on a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun - I will post some pictures and extra tales if I get time.

Taking Christmas to the outback

A long silver train has halted in the middle of a vast, empty plain that stretches away as far as the eye can see in all directions. There is no station, no platform and the nearest human settlement is a bumpy two hours drive away across the dusty bush. Nonetheless an excited crowd of Aboriginal children and adults has gathered to meet the train. Four young men climb down from one of the carriages, incongruously dressed for the burning 40C heat in smart black shirts, bright red ties and impossibly shiny patent leather shoes. It looks like a visitation from another planet. Then the well-tailored men start singing a cappella, the children join in, and this bleak outback scene is transformed into a heart-warming celebration of togetherness. More than a few of those watching find themselves holding back tears.

This is probably the strangest concert boy band Human Nature have performed since they formed at school in Sydney 17 years ago. The group is here in Watson, a remote South Australian community in the middle of the immense Nullarbor Plain, as guests on this year’s Indian Pacific Christmas train. The annual service, carrying a popular Australian singer or group and an ever-jovial Santa, aims to bring festive cheer to some of the most isolated people living along the rail route. This year Human Nature performed songs from their latest album of Motown covers – hence their snappy dressing, although reasonably enough they left off their suit jackets in Watson.

The Indian Pacific is one of the world’s great railway journeys. Cutting all the way across the continent, between the two oceans that give the service its name, the train offers a means of experiencing Australia’s vastness in comfort. Travelling the 4,352km between Sydney and Perth by rail takes you three-and-a-half days and transports you from bustling city suburbs to eerie ghost towns and wild bush landscapes.

Gazing out of the train window, you get fleeting glimpses of the outback’s tough beauty and austere way of life: lonely farmsteads surrounded by rusting utes and crumbling sheds, sheep grazing on salt lakes, towering mine works, crooked skeletal trees poking out of a land that often looks more dead than alive. This is Australia’s backyard, where much of its national identity was forged. Flying from coastal city to coastal city cuts out the country’s heart; the Indian Pacific is a way of getting from A to B that reminds you about all the forgotten Cs and Ds in between.

Many people worry they will get bored on such a long train journey, but the time passes much quicker than you might expect – it’s worth bringing a good book, but you may not get very far into it. Chatting to fellow passengers in the lounge bar and enjoying the excellent on-board meals whiles away the hours, but the main attraction is the remarkably varied scenery. You can spend hours just watching the soil colour turn from rusty brown to faded orange to burnt red. The land rises and falls, moving from dramatically plunging valleys in the Blue Mountains to the flat monotony of the Nullarbor. If you look carefully you might see kangaroos or the graceful Australian wedge-tail eagle that is the symbol of the Indian Pacific. On bendy stretches of track you can see the train stretching out in front of you like a silver snake sliding its way through the bush. Watching the world go by has never been so mesmerising.

This is not to say that you won’t appreciate the regular stops. After a while staggering down the corridor of a shuddering train carriage becomes second nature, but it is still a relief to get back onto a surface that doesn’t shake under your feet. Many travellers break their journey halfway in Adelaide and spend a couple of days enjoying the city’s mellow atmosphere and outstanding food and wine. The Indian Pacific’s other stops are likely to be places you haven’t visited before. Normal services don’t call at Watson, but they do halt at the once-thriving railway community of Cook (present-day population: two) and the colourful Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, whose seedy-but-charming pubs are an experience in themselves. Tours of several of the towns along the route are available as long as the train is running on time.

By the time the train pulled into East Perth station, my head was full of the wild, strange country that fills the huge spaces between Australia’s cities. After a series of brief encounters with the simple, hard life of the outback, it was a jolt to return to the impatient buzz of urban streets. The Indian Pacific reminds you that travelling is about more than just reaching your destination: my flight from Perth back to Sydney took only three-and-a-half hours, but what it saved in time it took away in experiences.