I’ve been living in Australia for two years now but the furthest I’ve gotten out of town is the weekly jaunt to Fremantle for work or a visit to Joondalup to see family. With this in mind when the chance came up to visit Sydney I seized on it and the chance to see a different side of Australia.

The original plan was to drive from Perth to Sydney, a trip that would likely take us three days if we drove 9 – 12 hours every day. Unfortunately we decided to scrap this idea as the cost of fuel, food and accommodation would put it out of our budget reach. So the other option seemed to be fly directly to Sydney, it was cheaper and quicker, but ultimately we also decided against this as it wouldn’t really allow us to see much of the outback. Thankfully there was a third option; hop on the transcontinental train from Perth to Adelaide and then Sydney.

The Indian Pacific was the first uninterrupted transcontinental rail train linking Perth to Sydney from late February 1970. The train measures 711 metres, weighs 1375 tonnes and travels a total of 4352 kilometres (roughly 65 hours). The passenger accommodation ranges from the luxury sleepers to the ‘cheap’ seats which are very reminiscent of Airplane seating.

What particularly attracted me to this method of transport was that one of my heroes, Bill Bryson, had made a similar trip and had commented that it was a good way to see Australia. Unfortunately with no publishing company to pay for our voyage we had to choose the cheap Red service seats. Even with a fairly hefty student discount it was still much more expensive than flying.

The train leaves Perth at 12:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday the 7^th of July and arrives in Sydney on Saturday the 10^th of July at 10:15 a.m. We’ll be spending most of our time on the train but there are a fair amount of stops; including a quick stop-off at the semi-Ghost town of Cook, in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, a morning stop in Adelaide, an afternoon trip into Broken Hill and finally we get to Sydney. I probably won’t be able to upload these till I actually arrive in Sydney but know that they will be written on the train.

It can’t have escaped your notice that I’ve not updated much lately and I hope to rectify that in the next few days. In the past week I’ve booked the tickets to Sydney, moved house and nearly frozen to death in the grip of winter that has seized Perth.

Recently we’ve been hit by a heat-wave that has made living basically impossible. Normally I’m alright with heat, I mean I don’t like it but I can live with it. Sure without air-conditioning the flats in the village basically become cheap saunas and being inside for too long might bring on permanent brain damage but it’s just heat right? Well unfortunately my flatmates and I were destined to find out just how deadly a heat-wave can be.

Thursday night seemed just like any other night that week. Sure it seemed like the day hadn’t cooled down when evening came but at least at night you aren’t subjected to the piercing intensity of the Australian sun. I had elected to sit out on the balcony and do some reading before turning in for the night so I was feeling quite happy with the world as I drifted off to the land of nod where my dreams rose up to meet me like an old familiar blanket. At about 4 a.m my dreams began to twist into nightmares with resounding cracks and booms that drove me right back to the edge of wakefulness, no mean feat because I have a knack for sleeping through loud noises.
I lay in bed with my eyes barely open and was still nearly blinded by an intense flash of white light that seemed to sear its way across my eyeballs. This was it, I decided, the aliens had finally come and it was time for the real adventure to begin. Of course once I was fully awake I realised my mistake because Aliens would never announce their arrival in such a showy fashion. Rather it was a thunder and lightning storm with better special effects than most Hollywood films. I love watching lightning and thunder so despite the early hour I stared out my window for about half an hour until the storm seemed to die down and the rain began to fall in fat splatters. Naively I thought this would signal the end of the heat-wave so I climbed back into bed and drifted back to sleep.

My first sign that something had gone wrong should have been that my alarm clock didn’t go off in the morning which made me late for class which meant I didn’t have time to check my email in the morning. This series of unfortunate events meant I didn’t fully comprehend the significance of the thunderstorm until much later in the day when I was already worn out from Uni. So when I finally did get home and was sitting down with a cup of tea to check my emails and my bank balance I was confronted with the horrible truth. My internet was gone.

Truth be told this actually isn’t that uncommon in the Murdoch Village. The internet provider they have is slightly less reliable than simply plugging your Ethernet cable into a sand pit and hoping that it will magically give you broadband. So when my browser returned with the error message I’ve come to associate with Star-tech I wasn’t that fussed and simply returned to my book hoping to get some reading done before I could veg out in front of Today Tonight, my bad news show of choice. This was sadly to be part two of the bad news, the TV reception was out. I am pretty good at getting bad news these days after having extensive training throughout my life but this was still enough to make me curl up into a ball and whimper a little bit.

I was still on the floor in the lounge when my flatmate, Ariel, came through and asked me if my internet was working. This was to be a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Thankfully I worked for most of the weekend so I was at least out of the flat even if I did debase myself by using the customer wi-fi to check if I had new mail. My flat on the other hand rapidly began to resemble something out of Lord of the Flies as we are all confirmed internet addicts who really miss their regular hit of bandwidth.

Finally, when it seemed like we were all about to give up on civilisation and begin the inevitable devolution to Cro-Magnons, the lights on our routers began to flicker to life and our email accounts began to show renewed life. Slowly we put out the fires we’d started, unchained the residents we’d planned to sacrifice and life returned back to normal. However I don’t think I’ll ever look at a lightning storm again without recalling how it nearly destroyed the lives of four innocent people whose only crime was relying on technology for everything.