Postcard to the Parish

Greetings from Australia

The seed of an idea dreamt up during Covid lockdown came to fruition at the end of March when Richard and I flew direct (17hours) from London to Perth, Western Australia. After some wonderful sightseeing and even seeing our first wild kangaroos, we embarked on The Indian Pacific, a majestic train that took us to Adelaide. This enormous train is some 800metres long and travels at a sedate speed of about 85km per hour. After leaving Perth we made a brief stop in Kalgoorlie to see the Super Pit gold mine – being late at night it was not easy to appreciate the sheer size of this open cast mine – but fascinating none the less. An interesting piece of information is that they employ women to drive the massive trucks as they take more care of them than the men and as each truck costs about $40m, you can see why. After our first night onboard, we awoke to see the Nullarbor desert from our cabin windows – the scenery didn’t change for the entire day but was never boring and we rumbled along the longest straight bit of railway in the world. Later that day we made a brief stop at the desolate town of Cook – known once as the Queen City of the Nullarbor, but now only has a population of 2. It gave us a chance to stretch our legs and walk up to see the front of the train and view the now derelict buildings of what was once a thriving town, built in 1917 for the railway builders and workmen, but closed in 1997 when the railway was privatised. We then continued our way to Adelaide aboard the train – which is very like a cruise ship on wheels. We had a small (7ft x4ft) but perfectly formed cabin – we both were in singles - luckily opposite each other. There were plenty of showers and toilets in our carriage and we were fed and watered extremely well. Fantastic meals with lots of local ingredients - Camel Curry anyone? Fine wines and live entertainment. We were sorry to leave the following morning at Adelaide station and wave goodbye to our fellow passengers as they continued onwards to Sydney. Richard and I the continued our journey by car to Melbourne and then flew up to Sydney before coming home having had a wonderful time.

Frances and Richard Reincke