John, Mary & Kathryn's Travel Page

2/4/97

The Sunlander: From Brisbane to Cairns By Rail

It takes a normal person, driving several hours a day, three days to get from Brisbane, in the middle of Australia's East Coast, to Cairns, the major city in Far North Queensland. Since we were traveling with Kathryn, who at 7 months was not a normal person and could not stand to be in her car seat for over two hours at a stretch, we booked ourselves into a first-class sleeping cabin on Queensland Rail's Sunlander which makes the journey in thirty-six hours, leaving Brisbane in the morning and arriving in Cairns late the next day.

As Americans, a long-distance train ride was something of a novelty to us. I had ridden overnight in sleeping cars just three times before, once in China, again from Rome to Venice, and several years ago on the West Coast, and Mary had never spent the night on rails. So we were like excited children as we explored our little cabin.

Sleeping car "F" on the Sunlander was built in the 1950's. She held seven first class cabins with bathrooms and showers on each end. A recent refurbishing had updated the carpets and walls with cool neutral patterns of mauve and gray, but had left intact the heavy chrome and brass fittings and the substantial sink that swung down from the cabin wall. Little bars of soap were placed in individual trays marked "Upper Berth" and "Lower Berth". The wide upholstered seats folded forward to create the bottom berth, and the upper berth dropped down from above. The berths weighed at least a hundred pounds each, the sink another fifty. Car F was built to last. The berths were cozy and comfortable, with individual reading lights and convenient oddments trays, and once I had struggled up the narrow ladder to the upper berth I seldom wanted to leave. Bunk beds gave us nervous visions of flying babies, so Kathryn and Mary were assigned to the bottom bunk.

We loved riding in our little cabin, lounging in the cool air-conditioning, listening to the muffled clackety-clack of the wheels and rails, and luxuriating in the knowledge that there was nothing that we had to do, no moving or driving or finding meals or hunting down hotels, for the next two days. There were books to read, our music to listen to, postcards to write, naps to take and snacks to nibble, and for excitement an amble up and down the train was sufficient.

Sometimes we wandered to the club cars and sipped drinks, chatting with the other passengers, reading the scattered newspapers and magazines, which mostly seemed to be of the Womans Daily sort and, I suspected, had been donated by the galley staff, and looking over the small selection of Queensland Rail souvenirs for sale. A Sunlander tea towel or keychain, perhaps?

Other times we sat in our berths, letting Kathryn play at our feet, and looked out the window. The country north of Brisbane was moist and green, long stretches of tall forest broken by occasional fields and small towns . The Sunlander stopped at many of these towns. There was usually a small uncovered platform, stairs descending to the ground, and a lonely shed planted in the empty red dirt. The town, if there was one, was seldom in sight. If the stop was to be for five or ten minutes the conductor would announce on the intercom "Smokers will have time for a quick cigarette" (the Sunlander was a strict nonsmoking train.) A small crowd of regular smokers would quickly alight and pace around the platform with puckered cheeks, puffing with concentration. We came to recognize each other, nodding greetings as we fumbled in our pockets and flicked our reluctant lighters in the wind. Other passengers, hopeful sightseers, also got off the train, stood on the barren platforms blinking in the sun and craning their necks to see whatever there was to see. After the third or fourth empty platform they faded away, leaving the small rural stations to the smokers and the few hardcore tourists who insisted on seeing every stop on the long journey.

Life on the Sunlander was peculiarly one-dimensional. The single corridor through all the cars was the only route to travel. We always went through the same cars and passed the same compartments, no matter where we were headed, and saw the same faces over and over, every few hours, as we brushed sideways past each other in the narrow corridor with murmured beg your pardons and not a bothers. Passengers were constantly squeezing through the dining car who had no intention of eating but were simply headed for a drink at the forward club car or a movie in the rear club car, a fact that must have been trying for the waitresses who served and cleaned and worked, four days a week, in a linear world just two feet wide. The Sunlander reminded me of a short book called Flatland, written by Edwin Abbott, that I had read as a child. The hero is a square, a respectable tradesman, who lives a quiet life in a two-dimensional world with other squares, triangles, octagons, and other polygons. One day a frightening creature appears in his house, a circle who can change his size, appear and disappear, and enter and leave locked rooms at will. Slowly the square realizes that the unworldly circle is actually a sphere from the three dimensional world, in which Flatland is only a single plane. To convince him this, the sphere takes the square to Lineland, a one dimensional world inhabited by a ill-tempered line segment who is equally taken aback when the square enters and exits his world, appearing to him as another line segment of magically changing length. The line is incapable of conceiving a second dimension. To him there is no right or left and no sideways: like a train, everything is either in front of him or behind him and the only directions are forward and reverse. I thought of us as little trains ourselves, bound to our narrow universe of a single long corridor, just as the Sunlander was bound to its rails pointing straight north to Cairns. As I wandered the empty corridor late at night, I imagined that on some very strange night a passenger on the Sunlander might walk down the deserted corridor and come to a intersecting corridor where he would step into another train rushing through the same point at the same moment.

Since we never had to worry about getting lost, the only responsibility passengers had on the Sunlander was to remember when we were scheduled for meals. The small restaurant served us in shifts, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner, and theoretically a passenger who overslept his meal could go hungry until the next meal, or subsist on chips and muffins from the club car. Mealtimes assumed great importance and I found myself checking my watch often as our appointed seating drew close. It was at lunch, somewhere on the Sunshine Coast, that we met Barbara and Karl from Everett, Washington. They were on a month-long tour of Australia and New Zealand, and since they were experienced grandparents Kathryn liked them immediately. She sat on Karl's belly and laid her head on his chest, or giggled as Barbara tickled her feet. We were happy to run into people who knew about little babies. Since we had left our childcare books and our own parents ten thousand miles away, much of what Kathryn did was a unexplained mystery. For example, it was Barbara who told us that when Kathryn pulled at her ears and hair and fussed, the reason was teething pain and not an ear infection, as Mary had theorized, or insects in her head, which had been my idea. We also talked about Karl's boat, a classic wooden motor yacht called the Winifred. She was built in 1926 in the Lake Union drydock, in the style known as a Lake Union Dreamboat, for a Washington brewery baron and could claim three first place finishes in the annual Olympia to Juneau races held during the late 1920's and early 1930's. Karl had purchased and restored her about eight years before, and they cruised to wooden boat events all up and down the West Coast. We talked about Washington State and the places that we had visited, or hoped to live in someday. It was nice to meet someone from home.

Somewhere in the middle of our journey, the landscape changed to flat, open plains under a big sky blue as robins' eggs. There were scattered groves of eucalyptus trees and low, scrubby bushes, and now and again a narrow dry streambed. Barbara spent a lot of time gazing out of her cabin window, and during the trip she saw some thirty kangaroos and many emus. After Mary heard this, she began looking for wildlife too, and also saw kangaroos along the tracks. They were usually sitting up, looking intently at our train as we passed. I lacked the patience to scan mile after mile of countryside, and in fact I eventually left Australia without ever seeing a single kangaroo. However, I saw plenty of golf ball pouches made from genuine kangaroo scrotums, so I did not feel shorted.

Kathryn never saw any kangaroos, either. She was happy to play and crawl on the carpet in our cabin, pulling herself upright on the seat cushions and periodically napping on her little blanket spread on the floor. When she became bored with us she visited Barbara and Karl, who were in the next cabin and seemed to appreciate the distraction.

The last several hours of our trip, as the Sunlander neared Cairns, were through thick tangled rainforest on steep slopes and then, as the land flattened out, endless plantations of sugar cane. For hour after hour, over hundreds of kilometers, we saw nothing but field after field of sugar cane blowing in the rain, and the occasional muddy four-wheel drive truck splashing along the red dirt roads through the tall cane. Mary and I exchanged what little we knew about sugar cane, and then I visited Karl and did the same. Then we speculated about it, and then we simply watched it. Eventually we ran out of things to say or think about sugar cane and sat silently, our eyes open and unfocused, the fields of cane a green blur over the rhythmic clackety-clack of the train and the rain streaming down our window. After hundreds of miles of wet cane fields, we awoke in Cairns, picked up our bags, and stepped off the Sunlander into our familiar three-dimensional world to find a telephone and a taxi.

Traveling On A Budget: A first class sleeping cabin for two on the Sunlander from Brisbane to Cairns, at $A486, is slightly less expensive than the economy airline ticket prices we were quoted plus a modest hotel, so two relaxing days and a comfortable night courtesy of Queensland Rail is the budget, as well as the more scenic, way to go. (If you want to really go cheap, the bus would probably take you over the same route for $A150 or therabouts, but with a teething, crawling baby I would probably have been divorced as well as ejected from the bus before the tenth hour.)

Staying Connected: There are mobile telephones on the train, which take special phone cards that can only be purchased and used onboard and thus are usually destined to end up as barely used souvenirs unless you can think of a lot of people to call. I suppose you could try to go online from these phones, but I didn't bother.

P.S.: The square's guide, the sphere, abandons him after the square suggests there must also be a four-dimensional world, which the sphere refuses to accept. The square then tries to tell other Flatlanders about his discovery of the third dimension, but is labeled a heretic and lunatic and sentenced to solitary imprisonment for the rest of his life.