It is dark outside, but the timetable says that we will shortly be passing Iloquara. I am not sure it is even a place, but somewhere to break up the long haul from Alice Springs to Tennant Creek. By the time we stop at Tennant Creek I will have slept and woken up at least 15 times. After a delicious meal of camel steak, we pulled into Alice Springs for a four hour stopover, during which numerous ‘whistle-stop’ tours were offered. We opted for the quad bike tour on a nearby cattle station called Undoolya. The station and its neighbouring station are now run by the same people and add up to about 3,500 square kilometres. Running beef cattle on this property supports about a dozen people, which to me translates as country so marginal it probably shouldn’t be farmed.  We were shown an elaborate fencing and gating system around the water holes designed to let the cattle in and keep the camels and kangaroos out. Ironically, if it was done the other way it would be less reliant on water, more productive and less damaging to the environment. (The problem is developing a sizable market for camel and kangaroo meat.)

The ride itself was tame and didn’t have enough time to admire the countryside. Our guide ‘Frosty’ spoke with a very broad accent in stilted phrases which made him sounds like the bloke in the Telstra ‘Emporer Nasi Goreng’ ad. He was also a bit patronising saying how well ‘our friends from Sydney’ had done, as if just because we came from Sydney we had never ridden motor bikes or been on a cattle farm. (Ironically I would see more beef cattle in a day at my high school, than I saw on this station today.) After the quad biking we were dropped off in town and walked back to the train.

Alice Springs has the same collection of national and multi-national chain stores you see in any town in Australia and it is not really much to look at. (Before you condemn me for making an opinion after a feew hours, I have been here before.)

Alice Springs is the gateway to the outback. ‘Gateway’ being the term used to describe a town that makes a good starting point to get somehere more interesting. Unless you stay for a few days and drive to the interesting spots out of town each day, Alice Springs has little to offer the casual visitor.

Having been fed just prior to getting off the train, it was time to be fed again when wwe got back on. I am hoping that three three-course meals a days will build up sufficient fat reserves to last me through the next two weeks and one course camp meals. A full stomach and a rocking train is a perfect recipe for sleep, so it is time to hit the sack (at the hideously late hour of 2045), so I can wake before dawn and get fed again before getting Katherine.

The rocking of the train resulted in a fitful, frequently interrupted sleep. The narrow top bunk had no side rail so I was in constant fear of rolling out of bed and plunging 2m to certain injury. We stopped twice during the night for extended periods at the localities of Fuchall and North Fuchall Downs. We arose early (0630) in order to maximise the number of hours sitting around doing nothing, which of course is much more civilised than lying in bed doing nothing.
The gentle glow of dawn was just starting to add colour to the sky as we entered the dining car. Sometime during the compote of fruit the sun itself poked its head out from behind a distant mesa, squeezing its light between the horizon and the low cloud.
The landscape became a mosaic of silhouetted saltbush punctuated by long shadows which slowly clawed their way toward the bases of the trees.
The orange red soil that gives this part of Australia its name, glowed in the warmth of a new day, while the occasional skeletal remains of cattle lay as testament to the harsh dry nature of the land. While having the overall appearance of being in the middle of nowhere, the area is surprisingly full of the works of man.
Dusty roads criss cross the railway track and the blown tyres of unlucky travellers litter the bush. The rail runs quite close to the Start Highway and often a car or road train can be seen in the distance.
Every now and then a fence-line runs up to the railway in a seemingly infinite line from the distant horizon. This typifies the peculiar white man motion that this piece of vast nothingness belongs to me, but the vast nothingness on the other side of the fence belongs to someone else.
In the city where people have small properties and savour each last square metre of land as they live in the back pocket of their neighbour, such distinctions make sense. Out here where some properties are the size of European countries, such a concept of ownership seems foreign or at least superfluous.
We don’t stop at Kulgera and all I know about the place I learnt from the old Redgum song, “Lear Jets Over Kulgera” where John Schumann is lamenting the sale of our natural resources to multi-national corporations. (I should not be too harsh on multi-national mining conglomerates, as I just missed out on a job with one.) Our next stop is Alice Springs, but that is another meal away.