Day Four – Arrival

Well we survived a trip that could have driven us insane. We travelled 65 hours, 4352 kilometres and roughly 20 muesli bars. We are actually very lucky that the trip is ending today. The carriage we were on has turned feral in the one night since it was cleaned with every drain in every bathroom becoming clogged and garbage beginning to spread all over the aisles.

Also it seems someone had broken into the carriage last night and replaced my usual impeccably groomed self with a red-eyed maniac who stank of travel and cheap meals. My joints ached like they had been wrenched around all night, which they essentially had, and I couldn’t face myself in the mirror because of the unusual angle my neck was stuck at.

Our last night aboard the train had been great fun as we’d met two students from Queensland who, thankfully, lowered themselves to playing our ridiculous ‘train’ games that we shamelessly stole from Callum. They also told us some fun stories about the people they’d travelled with in their carriage, some of them sounded as bad as the one’s we had met. We also got to watch the implosion of the UTS students who were having some huge row over politics or economics or possibly religion, we weren’t quite sure but a huge row was going on and those words were thrown around a lot. In their defence all of them really did show a lot of passion for the argument and that is quite important in life.

Falling asleep was harder to do because of the excitement of arriving in Sydney and it was nearly two o’clock in the morning when I finally dozed off. Sadly the attendants saw fit to wake us up at 5:45 to announce the birthday of a 66 year old passenger. Even she looked slightly put out by the loud congratulations over the P.A system. We were then informed we had half an hour to grab breakfast before they would stop serving it. At around ten the train began to pull through the main suburbs of Sydney and we began to see what we had travelled for four days to get to.

I can’t say I will miss the India Pacific but I can’t say I didn’t really enjoy the trip either. It takes a long time and is probably a fair bit more expensive than a plane and apparently the service has been greatly reduced. But I still don’t hesitate to recommend it to everyone as a great way to have a ‘new’ experience.