Leaving Darwin on The Ghan

Saturday 25^th July

Our week in Darwin is over and it is an early start to be at the rail terminal by 6am to load the car and ourselves on The Ghan which will take us the 3000kms to Adelaide. The train itself is quite remarkable, 27 carriages in total stretching for just under 800 metres. The train left Darwin more or less on schedule at 9.15 am and by lunchtime we had dined and were in Katherine for a 4 hour layover. We took the opportunity to go on a 2 hour Nature Cruise on the Katherine River. We saw lot’s of Freshwater Crocs, the biggest being a female about 3 metres long. It is now about 5.20pm and the next item on the agenda is dinner at 8.30 pm in the lovely old dining car. We are travelling Gold Class on the train, we baulked at the Platinum Grade price, so have a compact two berth cabin with shower and toilet. A considerable amount of dexterity will be required to master the ablution facilities and I may report on that in a later post. Tomorrow we stop at Alice Springs mid morning for a four hour layover and we are looking forward to seeing “A town like Alice”