We rejoined the Indian Pacific after passing this hotel, a location some of you may recognise as a location in the iconic drag queen film Priscilla – Queen of the Desert.
This journey was a lot more like I was expecting. Long travels through the desert, accompanied by fellow travellers using different transport modes.
We stopped off for an excursion around the Barossa Valley, which looks like many wine growing regions. One of the vineyards at which we did a tasting had a fantastic flower garden adjacent to the tasting building.
On our departure we passed both arable and solar farms.
We spent many hours travelling through the desert, stopping in the middle at a ‘town’ called Cook. It put this in inverted commas as nobody really lives there full time. It has always been a place where train drivers would stay to have breaks on the long journeys across the continent. It used to have permanent residents too who made their living off the drivers. Nowadays, the houses continue to be overnight stops for drivers (we picked up new drivers there too), but apart from them nobody else lives there anymore.
As a result, much time was spent with the others in my section of the train in the lounge car. A musician travelled with us and passed through the length of the train entertaining different sets of passengers at different times.
After we passed into Western Australia, we found more and more evidence of water along the train track, although some of them turned out to be salt lakes so not very helpful to those not on a fully catered train journey.
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