Board the legendary trans-outback

train, the Ghan, to strike deep into

Australias Red Centre, following the
tracks of the fearless pioneers who
explored this wilderness
WORDS OLIVER SMITH
@OliSmithTravel
PHOTOGRAPHS MATT MUNRO

The Ghan wends its way across

Australias vast and arid outback
on its three-day journey from
Adelaide to Darwin

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December 2015 Lonely Planet Traveller

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STRAP

THE GHAN

FOR MANY
AUSTRALIANS,
TRAVELLING ON
THE GHAN IS A WAY
TO GRASP THE
IMMENSITY OF
THEIR NATION

From left to right Dawood Choudhury in

the Adelaide Mosque; a Ghan poster in the
National Railway Museum, Adelaide;
lunch service in the Ghans dining carriage

DAY 1

ADELAIDE
What is the longest thing moving in the
world at the precise moment you read this?
A jumbo jet? An oil tanker? Disqualifying
phenomena like glaciers and tectonic plates,
the answer is likely to be a train, and quite
likely an Australian train, crawling across
the outback on the far side of the world.
Australia has the record for the worlds
longest train (4.5 miles) and though the
service on the platform of Adelaide Station
one crisp autumn morning measures a
comparatively measly half a mile, it is
still in the tradition of truly whopping,
postcode-straddling Australian trains.
This particular train is the Ghan, the
luxury sleeper service renowned as the
Orient Express of the Antipodes.
The train readies for departure, and
passengers potter along the platform with
their luggage in tow some board golf
buggies to reach the remoter carriages. On
board, uniformed staff shuttle guests to their
quarters: those with cabins at the front end
of the Ghan will have already travelled half
a mile of the 1,851 miles between Adelaide
and our final destination, Darwin, a threeday journey north across the continent.
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This trans-outback journey has a special

place in Australian hearts. The vast majority
of the passengers are (generally retired)
Aussies: some sent clockwork Ghans
puffing across the outback of their living
room floors as kids. But, more importantly,
some 85% of Australians live on or around
the coast. For many of them, travelling on
the Ghan is a way to grasp the immensity of
their nation for the first time: to get some
measure of the emptiness that extends into
infinity beyond their garden fences.
There is a frisson of anticipation before
departure. Passengers drum their fingers
waiting for the screech of the wheels. There
are questions for the staff: How do you turn
on the shower? Where is the dining car?
But the question most often asked is:
Why is it called the Ghan?

THE ADELAIDE
MOSQUE

The unlikely place to find the answer is the

Adelaide Mosque, a short walk from the
station in a quiet neighbourhood of fish and
chip shops and injury claims lawyers. The
little timber prayer hall is quiet but for the
hum of suburban traffic, and the squawks of
cockatoos perched on the minarets.

The story of this mosque is a strange one.

By the 1880s, Britain had conquered the
world and settled Australias coastline.
All that remained was a giant, faintly
embarrassing question mark over the
middle of the colony. Some twirlymoustached Victorian explorers mistakenly
believed this terra incognita contained an
inland sea, and set off into the wilderness
carrying boats on their backs. Not a small
number became part of the ancient
Australian tradition of disappearing into
the centre, never to be seen again.
Britain enlisted the help of the Afghan
cameleers young nomads who grew up
herding camels where the snows of the
Hindu Kush sloped down to the green
plains of the Punjab in modern-day India
and Pakistan. They generally werent
Afghans, but they were certainly experts
with camels, driving caravans through the
fierce midday heat, and supplying the little
archipelago of outposts that reached far
across the empty heart of Australia.
At the end of their days work, they would
tether their camels to eucalypts, lay their
prayer mats by the billabongs and sing
Allahu Akbar westward to the setting sun.
Then they would drift asleep with lungs full
of hookah smoke, under an unfamiliar sky
painted with upside-down constellations.

When the travelling days of the Ghans

were over, they built this mosque; their good
name was given to the railway they helped
construct, and whose tracks followed their
own, north from Adelaide into the outback.
Every time I come here I think of the
cameleers, says Dawood Choudhury, an
Australian Muslim who made the same
journey as the cameleers (albeit a century
later), travelling from Pakistan to Adelaide
as a teenager. We are proud of them, and we
still pray for their souls.
Dawood shows me around the mosque,
pulling out crinkly old Qurans, greeting
the congregation members with a Salaam
Aleykum and a Gday mate. The cameleers
are long gone, but the mosque they built
stands today as the oldest in the country.
When the cameleers crossed the outback,
they were far away from home, says
Dawood, waving goodbye. It could only
ever be their faith that sustained them.

PORT AUGUSTA

Departing Adelaide, the Ghan skirts the

shores of the Spencer Gulf until it reaches
Port Augusta. After this, the settlements
thin out, and the outback proper begins.
Glancing at a map of the Ghans route,
the place names seem to fall into two

The Ghan route has

connected Adelaide
with Alice Springs
since 1929, while the
northern stretch from
Alice to Darwin was
completed in 2004

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SMarcus
T RWilliams
AP

THE GHAN

riding camels through

the countryside near
Alice Springs

ANYONE MIGHT BE RANDOMLY

SEIZED BY THE OUTBACKS
STRANGE GRAVITATIONAL PULL

After Alice, the Ghan makes

a stop at Katherine, close
to the sandstone gorges
of Nitmiluk National Park

distinct categories. Firstly, there are

towns named by gentleman explorers
daydreaming of delicate ladies in distant
drawing rooms: Adelaide, Katherine, Alice
Springs. And there are names hinting at
the grim reality of outback exploration,
Aboriginal names like Oodnadatta (rotten
ground) and Bong Bong (mosquitoes
buzzing), others like Broken Hill, Coffin
Bay and Lake Disappointment.
Come nightfall, contours of hills rise
to the east, and withered trees stand frail
against a moonlit sky. Meanwhile, the bar
carriage is noisy with anecdotes beloved
of Australian retirees cricket scores,
quadruple heart bypasses, running over
deadly snakes with ride-on lawnmowers.
But the best stories are always about
disappearing into the centre. These have
many variations, but a basic set of
ingredients: a friend of a friend of a friend,
a cheery outback roadtrip, a wrong turn
down a dirt road and, finally, a set of
bones bleached by the sunshine. There
follows a cautionary nod to the gloom
outside the carriage window, as if anyone
might be randomly seized by the outbacks
strange gravitational pull, and suddenly
swallowed by its vastness.
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One Ghan passenger confronted with

the prospect of such an outback demise
was Chad Vance, a 19-year-old Alaskan
who, in 2009, disembarked the train
during a short stop in Port Augusta to
stretch his legs. Losing track of time, and
seeing the train edging along the platform
without him, he instinctively jumped onto
a carriage stairwell. He spent the best part
of two hours clinging on outside as the
Ghan sped across the outback at 70 miles
per hour, and he hammered on the door
as passengers clinked glasses and ate
succulent kangaroo steaks just inches
away. By the time a train engineer heard
him and pulled the emergency brake, his
skin was pale and his lips had turned blue.
Chad survived, but his story exemplifies
the strange paradox of the Ghan. It is the
joy of inhabiting a tiny luxury world:
eating gourmet food, listening to big band
music on the stereo, going to bed to find a
complimentary chocolate starting to melt
on your crisp linen pillow. And, all the
while, knowing that if you happened to be
a few feet in either direction youd find
yourself lost in landscapes of lethal
emptiness, disorientated and dumbstruck
by the desert wind, not a soul around.

DAY 2

ALICE SPRINGS

Not a soul that is, but the creatures that

roam the outback.
Roadkill is a recurring problem on the
Ghan, and with a braking length of a mile,
it is not unusual for the train to impact up to
three kangaroos on a journey (the remains
are removed using a high-powered hose).
Of more concern, however, is hitting one
of the many feral camels that roam the
outback, a collision that, in the words of one
engine driver, will sound like a bomb going
off at the front of the train (and might
dislodge false teeth further down).
One man who has lost two camels to
the Adelaide-Darwin railway is Marcus
Williams. The proud owner of an Akubrastyle hat and a squint honed by decades
spent studying horizons, Marcus also
owns a camel farm just outside Alice
Springs, the outback capital of squat
bungalows where everyone dismounts
on the second day of the trip.
Camels are heroes in Australia, he
explains, stroking the nose of one animal
that belches happily in its paddock. If you
went off exploring on a horse you would

Prints of old photos

in Alice Springs
station, including
one of the original
cameleers and
(left) camel-riding
for pleasure in 1892

THE GHAN

THE EMPTINESS IS TOTAL...

ON CERTAIN STRETCHES OF THE
JOURNEY, PASSING A TREE
COUNTS AS A MINOR EVENT

die, but camels have taken me to places

you wouldnt believe exist.
Australia has the worlds biggest wild
camel population, estimated by some to
number over 300,000. Marcuss association
with the animals began when, as a
wayfaring backpacker, he awoke one
morning on a sand dune to see a caravan
silently ambling by. Ever since, he has
made his living domesticating wild
camels, and offering very short rides to
the Ghans passengers during the trains
five-hour layover in Alice Springs.
The girls used to love it when I told
them I was a camel man, he says, climbing
atop one animal, and clip-clopping among
the sandy trails and the spinifex grasses
near the farm. I mean, how many camel
men have you met?
Quite remarkably, all of Marcuss camels
are descendants of those brought over from
Asia in the 19th century. Upon retirement
in the 1920s, the cameleers could not bear
to see their animals shot or performing
in the circuses of Europe. Instead, they
secretly freed them to new lives roving
and multiplying under interminable
Australian skies.
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Lonely Planet Traveller December 2015

MIDDLE OF
NOWHERE
The view from the Ghan is mostly
featureless: big desert, big skies, everything
sweating in furnace-hot temperatures.
Every so often, the train passes a cow
standing in a remote, godforsaken spot.
The cow invariably has a look of intense
confusion, as if trying to remember how it
came to be here in the first place. At other
times we pass termite mounds in clusters,
like an outback Stonehenge. But mostly the
emptiness is total. You can take a nap and
wake up hours later to precisely the same
view. On certain stretches of the journey,
passing a tree counts as a minor event.
Then, at around five oclock each day,
something miraculous and wonderful
happens. With sunset, the cracked earth
turns a deep red colour, and the landscape
suddenly becomes wildly beautiful.
It is a transformation as pronounced as
frog-to-Prince Charming, or Cinderella
going to the ball. With each passing
minute, the reds intensify. Ochre turns
to vermillion, and blinding sun gives way

to soft nectarine light. Look at a satellite

image, and most land on Earth follows
a muted colour scheme, tinted with the
muddy green of a Barbour jacket or the
beige of a Digestive biscuit, maybe. Only
Australia is a different colour altogether:
a deep terracotta red, a hue with almost
no peer on the planet.
By the time guests are summoned to
the dining car, the landscape is at its most
magnificent. Tangerine streaks of cloud
light the sky, kangaroos hop in and out of
view, and shadows grow from the trunks
of the acacias and the ghost gum trees.
For a few minutes all eyes at the dinner
table are transfixed forks miss mouths,
and steamed new potatoes roll onto the
cushioned carpets below.
The sun sinks below the horizon. By the
time pudding is served, everything is grey.

DAY 3

DARWIN
On the final day on the Ghan, we awake
to an altogether different, green landscape,
of tropical fruit plantations, mangrove

swamps and little rivers on their way

to the Timor Sea.
One of the biggest problems the first
Ghan railwaymen encountered were rivers
like these; there are historical accounts
of daredevil engine drivers racing over
bridges seconds before the structures were
washed away by flash floods. At other
times, flooding would leave trains
marooned for days in the bush, the staff
shooting brush turkeys to feed passengers.
Our journey ends safely next to freight
containers on the outskirts of Darwin,
the Northern Territory capital of high-rise
buildings and promenades by the Timor
Sea. Passengers dismount proud to have
chatted, scoffed and snored their way across
the empty core of Australia and the train is
prepared for its return journey. Bed linen is
changed. Kitchens are restocked. Squished
kangaroos are hosed off the engine. Only
then is the Ghan ready to perform the
timeless Aussie ritual: disappearing into
the centre, all over again.
Oliver Smith is senior features writer at
Lonely Planet Traveller. He loves all trains
around the world (except the District Line).

The Ghan parked by the

platform in Darwin, where
its crew of four drivers can
finally have a rest