Helen and Randall on the road

After a wander around Adelaide to find a decent coffee on a Sunday morning (impossible…everything is shut on Sundays!), we caught the free shuttle from the hostel to Adelaide Parklands Station to catch The Ghan:

We’d splashed out for the Gold Service so we had a private en-suite cabin:

and all meals included, served in the Queen Adelaide restaurant:

after our champagne reception in the ‘Outback Explorer Lounge’ (apparently they are all named after, well, outback explorers). They simply did not stop feeding us, with 3 courses for lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch on the second day, all prepared fresh on board and served at our white-linen-tablecloth-covered tables. Handily the cheapest wine on the menu was a sparkling, so we made do with that :-).

The views from the train were mostly of the desert and outback:

After lunch on Monday we disembarked at Alice Springs (the train continues to Katherine and Darwin)…

…where we settled into our fantastic hostel (more about this later) then headed into town (it’s SMALL) where we dug into the $10 pitchers of NT draft and later the mixed grill of emu, kangaroo, camel, crocodile and buffalo:

before heading back for an early night in preparation for our 6am pickup the next morning.