The Ghan, about to leave Alice Springs. Photo / Jill Worrall
The Ghan, about to leave Alice Springs. Photo / Jill Worrall
KEY POINTS:
The Ghan had stopped, inexplicably (well it was to me at the time) somewhere in the outback between Alice Springs and Adelaide.
Unfortunately not only had the train stopped but so too had the electricity supply and the temperature in the compartment had passed from pleasantly warm, paused briefly on rather hot and had now hit sticky and unpleasant.
Train travel, especially through harsh environments, is what I imagine journeys in space must be like.
One is cocooned in comfort (or in this case relative comfort), surrounded by the paraphernalia of modern life while outside lies a timeless environment in which one would be unlikely to survive unassisted.
I was trying to develop this line of thought a bit further but in my heat-befuddled state it was proving just too much. It was easier just to stare blankly into the desert and let my mind wander around the silver grasses and olive-green trees that were somehow sucking life from the sand.
That's when I saw the cyclist. He rode past us, bare-chested, hair in untidy curls to his shoulders, a black-brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead. He appeared not to notice the 30 or so carriages of the train marooned beside him.
I blinked - and he was gone. Were hallucinations a symptom of heat stroke?
"Did anyone else see the man on the bike?" I asked my travel companions. Two looked at me blankly. Thankfully one had.
The Ghan began to slide slowly deeper into South Australia. The lights flickered into life, there was a brief puff of air conditioning and then, like the cyclist, they too were gone.
The train kept moving however and in a few minutes I saw him again - upright on his rather old-fashioned bike, looking neither left nor right and apparently not a bead of sweat on him.
If I could have opened the window in my hermetically sealed sauna I would have called out to him because the need to know where he had come from and where he was going to was as nagging as a swarm of Aussie flies.
About 30 minutes later we were once again becalmed in the ocean of sand while a hapless electrician or two ventured outside to do something clever with the electrics. They succeeded and hopefully were rewarded with a magnum or two of cold beer, but the cyclist never appeared.
Maybe he's still out there - biking through the night, pedalling through a chilly dawn, kangaroos bounding away from his wheels, a flock of cockatoos rising up in alarm and circling like giant yellow-smudged confetti.
