What a joy to sleep in a bed that doesn’t move and is wide enough to roll over in without the fear of falling out. I slept soundly last night, no doubt aided by the farewell drinks on the train, although the 8-12 gunshots at 3am did disturb me briefly.

Yesterday began with an early breakfast and a four-hour stop in Katherine. We chose the helicopter tour of Katherine gorge and flew over all 13 gorges. In essence it is one long gorge, separated by sandbars. The flight was 25 minutes but the gorge was not as spectacular as I had imagined. I think it is probably nicer at ground level.

Since the flight only took up a fraction of the stop, we went to the visitors centre which had an interesting display outlining the scientific explanation of the formation of the gorge alongside the creation stories of the Jawoyn people.

There was a geocache just outside the railway station perimeter, but since we got back five minutes before boarding, we didn’t have a chance to find it. We pulled out of Katherine and stopped about 200m down the track where we sat for 65 minutes waiting for a goods train to clear the single track.

We arrived at Darwin station just after dark. Having waited about 100 years to complete the line from Alice Springs, you would think it would actually go to Darwin instead of stopping a 20 minute drive from town. Maybe the bus lobby got in the government’s ear.

Being on Gold Kangaroo service we had a complementary transfer to a hotel. Not our hotel mind you, but one 200 metres down the road. Ours must be quite new since the concierge of the other hotel wasn’t quite sure where ours was.

The hotel next door to us is still being built, so the view is dominated by a crane and we awoke to the sound of a pile driver. The hotel room has the smallest storage hot water service on the market, so being second into the shower, I had to turn the hot tap on full, the cold tap off and managed only a tepid shower. Still at least there was room to move unlike the shower on the train where you had to get out to change the soap from one hand to the other.

We shall shortly start to exploreDarwin. We have a brouchure listing the top ten attractions but only a few of them look interesting. After the morgue and the waste transfer station, I’m not sure where we are going. We were so tired last night (or ‘tired and emotional’) we went to bed without dinner, so our stomachs are rumbling for breakfast. Darwin here we come.

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.

I recently added “ClustrMaps” to my web site. It is a nifty little application that shows where all the visitors to my web site are coming from. On the first day I only had two dots. One was in the vicinity of Sydney and was obviously me visiting my own site. The second dot came right from the middle of Australia. This could mean either someone from Alice Springs visited my site very quickly or a more sinister explanation. Just outside of Alice Springs is the so-called “joint defence establishment” of Pine Gap. In reality it is a CIA station for intercepting communications. Maybe the super spies are checking to make sure I don’t start plotting the overthrow of the United States from my backroom. (Little do they know, my plans to overthrow the United States are kept in the sitting room.)

Keep defending democracy guys, oh and if you happen to be reading this, I have just checked the attic and Osama Bin Laden is not hiding there. It gives you one less place to look.