The Indian Pacific

January 31 - February 4, 2026

This is our route over the next 5 days. As you can see, we are now re-crossing the Australian continent back to Sydney.

The Crowne Plaza was great because they had a free guest laundry and a pretty well kitted out fitness center. They also had a nice pool, but we ran out of time.

We had a couple of hours to waste and found ourselves at the Perth Mint which happened to be open on a saturday, so we decided to take the tour. Amongst other thing, they had a 1 ton solid gold coin and a live gold pouring demonstration.

From there it was time to head over to the train station to catch our Indian Pacific train back to Sydney. On the way we saw a flock of little corella which is a type of cockatoo.

This train is 32 carriages long, so about 10 more than Rovos Rail. It is a "modern" train and the tracks are better to allow "reasonable" speeds across Australia.

We are taking Platinum Class, which is the highest class available on this 3 class train (gold, gold premium and platinum are the options). At checkin we could go over and pet Hazel, a live koala bear, and a snake. Buni got quite concerned about the snake....

There was Bollinger Champagne and options for snacks in the waiting area.

Our room is smaller than Rovos Rail and it is a pullman type carriage, meaning the bed is up during the day. We decided to get rid of our suitcases because we just had zero room. With the bed out....

Here;s our agenda for this evening. Basically it's dinner, passing along a pretty valley, and engineer crew change-over.

Dinner was 1 big social table as an ice breaker. I sat next to a gay couple from London. One is a family court judge (adjudicating child placement) and the other a probate attorney. On the other side was a couple from Wales. Most of the others were either Australian or British with maybe one other US couple. The food was only average and I'm hoping for an improvement tomorrow.

The train moves all night and I was feeling a bit nauseous. Not sure if it was the movement or the alcohol.

February 1 -

Our goal today is getting to Cook

We had a very early morning to accommodate our first train stop and tour. We were on the tour called "Golden Treasures" because we were too late to sign up for "The Pit". Our stop was Kalgoorlie. The city was established in 1893 during the Western Australia gold rushes. It is home of the Fimiston Open Pit gold mine, commonly known as the "Super Pit" - Australia's largest open-cut gold mine until 2015. Not surprisingly, it's one of the biggest employers of the town and it was also founded in 1893. We spent most of the morning looking at Hannans North Tourist Mine.

The highlight for me was seeing the huge dump trucks with wheels well over 2 meters high. There was a smashed truck used as a safety example which was run over by one of these dump trucks.

Later we got a stop at the Super Pit observation post and got to see one of the huge excavators shovel rock into one of the big dump trucks.

we were back for brunch at 9am. Brunch was a chicken ceasar with a poached egg and toast.

There will be 3 time changes as we head East back to Sydney. The first is today at 1pm and we will lose 1.5 hours as we cross into the state of South Australia. There were some signs (facing the wrong way) and a monument (which I just caught the back end of) as we crossed into SA.

So far the view is beigy green scrub, eucalypt trees and red soil - seemingly never ending for hundreds of miles. We are traveling through part of the Nullarbor Plain (Nullarbor = no trees) - a vast, arid, and largely treeless limestone landscape stretching ~1,200 km between Ceduna (SA) and Norseman (WA) along Australia’s southern coast. Known for the "90 Mile Straight" (Australia's longest, straightest road) and dramatic Bunda Cliffs, it offers unique, remote road trips across the Eyre Highway.

Dinner was also good. The food was definitely better than Rovos Rail - possibly because it was simpler and with fewer sauces. I had pork loin.

Tonight we stopped at Cook for star gazing and a bond fire. Cook is a railway station and crossing loop located in the Australian state of South Australia on the Trans-Australian Railway. It is very remote:  824 kilometres (512 miles) by rail from Port Augusta, 863 kilometres (536 miles) by rail from Kalgoorlie, and about 100 kilometres (62 mi) north of the Eyre Highway via an unsealed road. It is on the longest stretch of straight railway in the world, at 478 kilometres (297 mi), which extends from Ooldea, South Australia to beyond Loongana, Western Australia. This was an even longer stretch of straight than the 114 miles on Rovos Rail. Cook was established in 1917 on the Nullarbor Plain when the Trans-Australian Railway was built. It is named after the sixth Prime Minister of Australia, Joseph Cook

This was a bit of a bust since there was an almost full moon and very few stars were visible. The "guided" star gazing was also not enjoyable as the laser pointers weren't visible and some of the guided viewing was flat wrong. Add to that bad humor and an asian accent that made the direction almost unintelligible. The hot cocoa with baileys was pretty good.

2/2 - Still in the Nullarbar...Today some will disembark in Adelaide while we go to the winery.

It's a long flat section of Australia which looks a bit like West Texas. There are some very long freight trains....

Finally we saw some kangaroos - no photos.  Several live ones bouncing around and one dead one.

Lunch - halloumi salad

We slowly came out of the nullarbar and wound around Lake Hart which was a salt lake.  It looked a bit like Uyuni in Bolivia.

The evening activity was visiting the Seppeltsfield Winery. The winery is located in the Barossa Valley. It's been in business since 1851 and has been family owned for most of that time. It is one of Australia's oldest wineries. Many of it's buildings are heritage listed. As Platinum travellers we got to try the 100+ year tawny. The winery has a "known" chef on staff who created dinner/wine pairings for us. There was a coopering demonstration and dancing after dinner to a live band. The biggest hits were the Texas 2-step dance and something involving a circle and conga line. Chris/I didn't participate....

2/3 - Our last full day on board. Our stop today was in Broken Hill.

The scenery is gradually changing to include trees, hills and more water. The water had pelicans...

We also saw more kangaroos, emus, dust devils and bones

Breakfast was yogurt and chia seeds. Lunch was a sort of salad with tahini dressing.

Broken Hill was established in 1882. It is a frontier mining town in the far west of New South Wales, in the Australian outback, in the middle of nowhere. Our excursion took us to nearby Silverton and the disused 19th-century Daydream Mine. We had a 20 minute extension when the bus driver forgot where he was going and took the turn to the Living Desert State Park Sculpture Symposium.

This was a long drive along unsealed roads in a rather uncomfortable bus. We had to sign our lives away when we got there because we were actually going down into the mine, but more on that later. Most of the mining was done by Cornish men whose height measured under 5 feet tall and by children. Parents and mine agents gave the children opium to make them cooperative and agree to work. There were photos of young children smoking opium pipes. It was all rather bleak, hot and dusty. I would have hated to live/work there.

After the above ground tour, we were issued hard hats and walked down a cramped, dark, rather dangerous mine for about 100 feet. At the bottom was demonstrated how they dug out the ore and he turned out the light just for fun. It was good to know I'm not claustrophobic. It was also good to get back to the top where we met in the cafe for a "cream tea".

It was good to get back to the train. Coming into town we saw the monument to the miners and the Palace Hotel, famous for scenes from Pricilla, Queen of the Dessert.

This evening "last supper" which turned into a bit of a drunken festivity. There was much revelry.

2/4 - detraining and getting to Hobart

An early and hung over start to the day. Today we started with breakfast (poached egg and toast)

It is with sadness that we leave the Indian Pacific to take our Blue Mountain Hike/Excursion (see below). It was such a wonderful experience. We've tried to understand why we liked it more than Rovos Rail and I think it came down to: a great crew with a great attitude (pictured are Left/right, Caleb, Sam, Matilda, and Robin)

fun fellow travellers, and nice food. We recommend it and would take it again.

As mentioned above, we got off our Indian Pacific train at Mount Victoria to take our hike through the Blue Mountains. Here's a video of highlights. The Blue Mountain area is a UNESCO site. They are called the blue mountains because the gum tree oil interacts with the air and has a blue tinge when the sun shines on it. We were lucky with the weather.

Our walk was ruined by trail maintenance, so we had quite a bit of road walking and a very loud helicopter which seemed like it was following us for the first half. We did see a nice waterfall, some sulphur crested cockatoos, and the three sisters. Lunch was very uninspiring and was like a bunch of small appetizers with a big glob of pavlova cake.

At Katoomba we caught our charter train back directly back to Sydney. The station still had it's original points management.

At the Central Station we picked up our luggage and were transferred back to Sydney Airport.

Some interesting moments where we fought with Qantas about the weight of our luggage. I continually get targeted as an old, white lady and someone who can be brow beaten. Chris just sails through without being challenged. We spent the time waiting for our flight in the same lounge as a week ago.

Just by chance Chris found out our Hobart hotel was sold 2 months ago. Supposedly they will honor our reservation, but we got no notice of the change. This will be an interesting thing for later this evening. More on that and our flight to Hobart tomorrow.