I used to be obsessive about doing long train journeys from start to finish. I'd travel from London to Inverness, Scotland; Buenos Aires to San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina; and Moscow to Beijing, testing myself on the longest trips available in the country or continent I was visiting. It's probably a male thing, but that doesn't make it any easier to overcome.
So I flew to Adelaide, Australia, feeling a bit guilty, as I was joining the storied Indian Pacific train part way along its 4,350-kilometre route from Sydney to Perth. My schedule didn't allow for the full monty. Instead of three nights, I'd be doing just two, and missing the stretch through the Blue Mountains. On the upside, I would, I hoped, be seeing lots of arid plain and big skies - archetypal Australia - with a decent chance of big red kangaroos and twitchy emus en route.
The journey started off in almost comical luxury, with a welcome cocktail and lots of socialising in the bar. I had a private room with a shower and loo attached, and there were only half a dozen people sharing a whole carriage with me. At dinner time, we had allotted times to be at our tables and were served gourmet food and wines from Adelaide, Margaret River and the other great vineyard regions. I had a delicious steak and robust shiraz the first night, and chatted to an expat mining executive and his wife also bound for Perth. But I had no sense of the great wilderness, or that the arduous journeys people used to make across the massive hinterland were the stuff of history books.
By the next morning, we had entered the Nullarbor Plain, the vast, treeless (as its name indicates) limestone plateau that stretches across the bottom corner of southwestern Australia. One of the guards told me it had been raining, and pointed out flowers bursting out of the flat earth. But there were heavy clouds hanging over the sky, and there was still a moodiness and melancholy to the immense plain.
I saw no big reds or emus, and was soon at lunch again, eating a kangaroo meat starter in the stylishly retro-fitted dining car, sipping on a gently oaked Chardonnay, and starting to feel I had arrived in the epic nothingness of my dreams.
In the afternoon, I retired to my cabin, staring out or peering navel-wards, listening to the rhythm of the bogies below and watching the light change slowly on the plain. I had with me a great novel (Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, about Perth), a notebook for scribbling down random ideas and an iPod full of tunes. There was also a handy little onboard newspaper called Far Horizons, which filled me in on the stops we were passing through, the history of the line and the nature we might see, or hear, or imagine.