One of the particularly delightful things about this period coming up, preparing to leave Cairns, is that we have decided to make a point of revisiting the very special places we have known and loved up here. I was born here and have spent all but three of my forty years living here, and I have roamed extensively in the area between Cooktown and Townsville during that time. We have started making a list of places we don't want to leave here without seeing one more time, and there are a few that we have not yet got around to seeing and want to see for the first time while we still have the chance. These little excursions will serve as our little rewards or celebrations of renovation milestones!
I have a passion for trains that so far, I have had far too few chances to indulge. There are no suburban trains in Cairns, only intercity ones, and my first train experience was a trip I took aged 4 with my mother and my newborn brother from Cairns to Melbourne on the Sunlander in 1971. Scenes I recall from that trip are the most vivid memories I have from my early childhood. All through my early childhood my grandmother would come to visit by train and so there were lots of opportunities to climb on and check out the interior of the train and to this day I still feel the same strong yearning to stay aboard and have the train take me wherever it is going. All other modes of transport make me feel more or less uneasy and unsafe but I find train travel utterly relaxing and splendidly indulgent in its long, slow journeys.
When I first left home and moved to Brisbane I was terribly homesick at first, and travelled home to Cairns alone by train for a visit to ease the longing, a 36 hour trip. I had never felt so thoroughly in charge of myself, and revelled in the solitude. A few months later I came alone again to surprise my best friend at her wedding - bliss! At the end of the first leg of each of these journeys, I felt a huge sense of elation at the knowledge that in a week or so, I could do it all again on the way home.
My next train journey was more dramatic. In desperate unhappiness with my first husband, I fled the Hunter Valley for a couple of weeks in Melbourne with my best friend. My husband dropped me at the Newcastle train station at 5am and I encountered a double decker train for the first time. I felt that same elation, that same sense of incredible freedom and liberty and being left alone! I gawped at huge banks of wattle by the track as we approached the Hawkesbury River a couple of hours later. At the train station in Sydney I had breakfast - sausages and eggs - alone and excited in the grand old, dark panelled dining room before finding my connecting train to Melbourne. On the journey through NSW and the Victorian countryside, I saw sheep in the paddocks for the first time and I saw a breathtaking rainbow of a type I have never seen before or after - it was as if a normal "arch" rainbow had been straightened out, and it hung in the sky like a perfectly straight bar of brilliant colour. I glanced around the train - my fellow passengers were dozing, knitting, reading....I wanted to say "Look, everyone....!
My most recent train journey was a trip from Cairns just down the track a couple of hours to Cardwell for New Year's Eve a few years back. I had made a resolution to take a train trip the previous NYE and had found myself running critically short of time to keep it - so we decided we would take the train to Cardwell. We embarked early in the morning, and and tackled our picnic of Indian scotch eggs, lempkes and "Shooter's loaf" and had a celebratory Marguerita in coffee cups from our thermos. That must surely be one of the most picturesque train trips in the country, snaking through emerald green fields of sugarcane, across numerous little clear forest rivers and travelling alongside rugged, steaming hills and mountains covered in lush, impenetrable jungle. I was completely gobsmacked by the stunningness of it all and was quite taken by surprise to discover that we were Almost There and were going to be expected to disembark in half an hour. The big question was, had those delicious margaritas left us capable of finding, and carrying, our luggage and ourselves from the train? We weren't sure but we thought we'd give it a go. All the laughing didn't help a lot. When we pulled up in Cardwell there was no platform, and we were highly amused, and also a little concerned, to notice a guy wheeling a little ladder over for us to climb down with suitcases and an esky. All went smoothly. The train station was directly behind the pub, to which we retired from the 40 degree heat to buy a case of beer and await Cardwell's only taxi to drive us the couple of kilometres to our caravan park.
After a week lounging about Cardwell, primarily occupied with trying to avoid the deathly heat, we taxied back to the train station to catch our train home. The train station was just an unmanned shed, and we waited there in the extreme heat for an hour and a half, before our delayed train arrived. The train pulled up at the extreme opposite end to the economy carriages where we were supposed to be sitting, and as the train was quite empty, the conductor just showed us into the nearest empty sleeping car! Bonus! We could not believe our good fortune, to have our own private little haven where we could giggle and gobble stuff from our esky to our heart's content. There were clean towels in there, so we took a shower and washed the morning's heat and grime away and had the most wonderful trip home.
I have just booked our next train adventure, on the glorious art-deco silver Savannahlander, which runs north west from Cairns to little outback towns like Almaden, Forsayth, and Einsaleigh
I have been looking for an opportunity to take this train for at least five years, so it is a definite must-do before we leave. We are going on the Easter long weekend - I can't wait! Check it out here :http://www.savannahlander.com.au/gallery/2.html
No comments:
Post a Comment