The Ghan versus Indian Pacific – which train to choo-choose?

Steve Madgwick Steve Madgwick
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The Ghan or Indian Pacific? It’s a tough choice between Australia’s two most epic rail holidays. No fear, Megan Arkinstall (The Ghan) and Steve Madgwick (Indian Pacific) will help you decide which train journey is best for you.

Which route is best for you?

The 2979-kilometre, 54-hour Ghan journey heads straight up the Red Centre from Adelaide to Darwin (and vice versa). It takes three days and two nights north-bound (four days and three nights south-bound).

 

The 65-hour Indian Pacific trip traverses the continent, from Sydney to Perth (via Adelaide), covering cross sections of many and varied regions including the famed Nullarbor Plain crossing. The 4352-kilometre journey takes three nights and four days.

What’s the physical difference between the two trains?

Besides the signage and livery, very little actually. Adelaide-based Great Southern Rail operates both The Ghan and Indian Pacific so the carriage and restaurant car interiors are identical (a carriage on The Ghan route may be on the Indian Pacific the following week).

 

The locomotives are different colours – Red for The Ghan, blue and yellow for the Indian Pacific – and external carriage signage is interchangeable.

The question of price – how much?

There are two classes on the trains: Gold and Platinum services. Indian Pacific fares (Sydney-Perth)  start at $2269 (Gold) and $3919 (Platinum). Adelaide to Darwin on The Ghan starts at $1789 (Gold) and $3319 (Platinum) – see Great Southern Rail for fares in the opposite direction.

 

These are one-way fares so you will need to allow for a return airfare and at least a night’s accommodation at the other end too.

 

Book six months in advance to get a 20 per cent discount off Gold class.

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Where do they stop?

The Indian Pacific stops at Broken Hill in outback NSW (where you have the chance to travel out to the sandstone sculptures of the Living Desert Reserve) and includes either an evening’s side trip to the Barossa Valley (or a walking tour of Adelaide). There are two stops along the Nullarbor; a whistle-stop rest at the tiny town of Cook and a trackside feast at Rawlinna, an expansive and remote sheep station.

 

A stop-off at the quirky South Australian town of Coober Pedy (south-bound only) has recently been added to The Ghan’s classic Red Centre stop at Alice Springs (where you can go for a camel ride and experience some local indigenous culture) and Katherine, where there is an option for a boat cruise through Katherine Gorge.

The view: Which scenery will I prefer?

The Indian Pacific warms up through the windy, dramatic bush-scape of Sydney’s Blue Mountains and then flashes past tiny towns into the NSW outback. The view turns a little more fecund as the train heads past Adelaide (and near to the Barossa Valley) before the Nullarbor pancake begins. Greenery returns as you coast into Western Australia’s verdant Avon Valley, followed by the ’burbs of Perth.

 

On The Ghan (from Adelaide) rolling green hills flatten into wine country and farmland, then dry rugged terrain and the jagged peaks on the Flinders Ranges. The rural landscape out this way is marked by abandonment: farming apparatus, crumbling buildings.

 

Keep an eye out for the small Iron Man monument between Tarcoola and Alice Springs – which marks the one millionth concrete sleeper laid in the track – and Finke River, which depending on season can be just a dry sandy river bed lined by red river gums. By the time the train enters Katherine, lush green foliage intersperses the arid land and then you know you have arrived in the tropics.

Who are your fellow passengers?

Obviously every trip is different, but as a rule there will be more of an Australian contingent aboard the Indian Pacific whereas The Ghan attracts more foreign tourists attracted to the Red Centre outback experience and a taste of indigenous culture.

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Gold versus platinum class

Besides cost, the biggest difference between the classes is space (a Platinum cabin is about twice the size of the Gold) – and size can matter over a several-day train journey. The bed in Platinum class can fold into a double whereas in Gold class you get two single fold-downs.

 

The extra premium of Platinum gets you a larger en-suite (the Gold class one is little snug), bigger windows, free transfers (within 50 kilometres of the terminal), more luggage allowance and access to the Platinum Club Car where there are more comprehensive wine and food options.

The bottom line – Battle of the Highlights

Megan: Alice Springs, a town of extraordinary character and intrinsically Australian landscapes of deep-red dirt and sage-green scrub. Here we enjoyed a trek at Pyndan Camel Tracks with the majestic MacDonnell Ranges as our backdrop.

 

Steve: Crossing the Nullarbor, indeed the whole country is a highlight in itself. A traditional trackside outback lamb roast dinner under the stars at Rawlinna, a seriously remote sheep station on the Nullarbor, will blow your senses – especially the tastebuds.

 

More details: For more information on The Ghan or the Indian Pacific see Great Southern Rail
Steve Madgwick

Steve Madgwick

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This scenic Victorian region is the perfect antidote to city life

    Craig Tansley Craig Tansley
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    Video credit: Visit Victoria/Tourism Australia

    The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.

    There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.

    Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.

    ‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.

    Exchanging city chaos for country calm

    kangaroos near Halls Gap, Grampians National Park
    The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)

    I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.

    I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.

    The trails and treasures of the Grampians

    sunrise at Grampians National Park /Gariwerd
    Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)

    Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.

    Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.

    walking through a cave, Hollow Mountain
    Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)

    There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.

    Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.

    “There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.

    wildflowers in Grampians National Park
    Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)

    We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.

    Grampians National Park at sunset
    Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)

    The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.

    What else is on offer in The Grampians?

    a boat travelling along the Wimmera River inDimboola
    Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)

    You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.

    And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).

    dining at Pomonal Estate
    Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)

    Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.

    The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.

    Salingers of Great Western
    Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)

    There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.

    The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.

    Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.

    And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.

    Kookaburras on a tree
    Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)

    You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.

    A traveller’s checklist

    Staying there

    Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.

    Playing there

    abseiling down Hollow Mountain
    Hollow Mountain is a popular abseiling site.

    Go abseiling under the stars or join a guided hike with Absolute Outdoors. Visit Wama, Australia’s first environmental art centre. Check out Dimboola’s eccentric Imaginarium.

    Eating there

    steak, naan bread and beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap serves a great steak on naan bread.

    Eat world-class cuisine at Pomonal Estate. Dine and stay at much-revered icon Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. The ‘steak on naan’ at Halls Gap brewhouse Paper Scissors Rock, can’t be beat.

    Dunkeld Arboretum in Grampians National Park
    The serene Dunkeld Arboretum.

    For Halls Gap’s best breakfasts head to Livefast Cafe. Sip local wines at Great Western’s historic wineries, Best’s Wines, Seppelt Wines and Norton Estate Wines.

    two glasses of beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Sink a cold one at Paper Scissors Rock.