Into The Wild West

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Ok so you know how its weird when you come across a place where you can see for ever and you can’t see anything much, like a desert, or if you’ve never been to one; like Yorkshire. So the Nullarbor plain is translated as Treeless Plain, the reason for this is because it has no trees, ‘big deal there are plenty of places without trees' you think. Of course this is true, there are, however can you look out the window of a train for an hour and detect anything different about the scenery? (when it's moving) if so than you have yet to experience the Nullarbor, it was much like travelling the Northern Territory where it all looked pretty much the same only here you could see for miles, and all you could see was these tough little cactus like shrubs that somehow lived there. Also when you went to sleep and woke up the next day, the scenery looked exactly the same, checked against photos, the only difference being the position of the sun. It really made you wonder if indeed you had moved at all or weren’t just stuck in some weird space/time paradox thingy where you can never leave.

We had one stop where we got out, at a place called Cook, and a weird little place it was. Just a bunch of abandoned buildings that somehow got there, (I have no idea how they got so far into nowhere, but they did) a little shop selling random souvenirs, even if no one lives there they will still try to make money outta you, and a few signs that appropriately summed up the place.

I travelled as far as Kalgoorlie but during the day and a half that I was on the train I got to know the others pretty well, including a Turkish lady who was off to Perth to join an archaeology course, a bunch of people from the other carriage, all a very cheerful friendly bunch and 1 guy who snored so loudly I thought perhaps we had truly entered an alien dimension. Sven joined me in my carriage, which had much more space and we flipped around the chairs (you can do that in Oz, flip round chairs on trains, no idea why but its brilliant.) so we each had 2 extra wide seats to ourselves, perfect. We chilled out and snacked, watched films, I disappeared to do a little writing, I came back and ate more, we told each other about our lives and other halves (blank in my case) and of course we slept. Nearing Kalgoorlie I was quite annoyed a my choice, whilst I wanted to see the famous little town and its little gold mine, I didn’t really care and I if I had carried on to Perth I would get to hang out with my new friends for a little longer instead of missing them as would happen as they were both leaving Perth on or before the day I arrived.

So anyways we arrived at night having gone a full day and a bit and went out to grab some food. There was a few of us and when I came back from dropping my bags off at the hostel there was even more, all sitting outside a Japanese as it was the only reasonably priced food around. I got extra as well as one of the german girls didn’t want all of hers. Two for the price of one! Sadly though the time came to say goodbye and I hugged lots of people and had only 1 e-mail, hopefully he had all of theirs… time to retire it was so back to the Gold dust YHA to start my life in the west.