This 2,704-Mile Train Across Australia Is a Luxury Outback Adventure

In the glare of the intense summer sun, the Indian Pacific had a reflective, chromatic glow. The nearly 3,000-foot-long train was patiently idling beside the platform at East Perth Terminal, where a spread of scones, strawberry jam, clotted cream, and Bollinger champagne welcomed eager travelers. Over the hubbub of excitement, I could hear an acoustic guitar being played a few feet from where we stood.

This jubilant scene had been orchestrated by Journey Beyond , an Australia-based train and tour operator that was about to take me and nearly 200 other guests on a five-day odyssey along one of the world's longest transcontinental railway routes. Soon we'd jump aboard and wave goodbye to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and start hurtling eastward toward Sydney , some 2,700 miles away. Along the route, we'd be chugging between Outback towns and weaving through mind-expanding deserts and mountain ranges. 

The story of the continent's train service begins at the turn of the 20th century. A newly unified Australia (which had been a collection of separate British colonies until 1901) was faced with one of its first major challenges: connecting its various railroads so they would span the full breadth of the land. While the country was successful in creating the Trans-Australian line in 1917, differing rail gauges left gaps in service that forced passengers to switch trains several times to reach their destinations. Finally, in 1968, a fully continuous line was completed, driven by the need to transport iron ore to the coast. Just two years later, the Indian Pacific embarked on its maiden voyage from Sydney, sharing the tracks with industrial rail freighters. It arrived in Perth three days later—at the same station I was now departing from—to the frenzied welcome of 10,000 spectators. 

Since then, the accommodations and experiences of the Indian Pacific have evolved. But its old-world sense of adventure, thanks to direct access to the Golden Outback—the western region of the country's vast interior, with ties to the gold rush of the late 1800s—has remained. I had already seen much of Australia's coastline through a series of drives, but I'd long wanted to explore the country's heartland. The Indian Pacific, newly relevant thanks to an updated itinerary, was my chance. 

After settling into my relatively spacious cabin, which had a couch that converted into a queen-size bed, I went to join my fellow passengers for a nightcap. There are three carriage classes on the Indian Pacific: Gold, Gold Premium, and Platinum. While Gold and Gold Premium share a dedicated lounge and dining car, Platinum has its own. (This April, the train operator further bolstered its lineup with two larger luxury suites, Aurora and Australis, which both come with dedicated butler service.) 

I arrived at the Platinum lounge to find guests already mingling over even more glasses of Bollinger. I detected accents from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Canada. Many travelers were making their way to the opposite coast for weddings, family reunions, or farther voyages to Tasmania or New Zealand. Rather than fly over the country and miss the landscapes unfolding on the ground, they'd chosen to catch a train and see what few others do. 

The next morning found us in Kalgoorlie, an Outback city established during the gold rush. Miners flooded the dusty flats surrounding this area after three Irish prospectors, who had immigrated to Australia in the hopes of making their fortunes, accidentally stumbled across gold while looking for water in 1893. "We've been digging gold out of the ground at a furious rate ever since," Steve Mogridge, a former miner turned guide, told our group of passengers on an excursion focused on the quirky history and present-day lore of the city. While he drove us around its Edwardian-era streets, he shared that in its heyday, Kalgoorlie had 115 drinking establishments serving 25,000 thirsty miners—including one notable American engineer named Herbert Hoover, decades before he became the 31st president of the United States. 

We stopped at the historic town hall and the Super Pit, an immense open-cut gold mine, the largest in Australia. It made the 176-ton yellow trucks inside look like children's toys. We then ended the day at Chunky Timber Co. , an art business that turns reclaimed wood into furniture, homewares, and jewelry. A massive dinosaur sculpture—the work of artisan Heath Parsons and owner Kim "Chunky" Gent, a bear of a man sporting an impressive white beard—greeted us at the entrance. "We made the dinosaur for Breast Cancer Awareness Month," Gent told us. "She got sent around town and came back with a pink bra hanging out of her mouth." 

On a tour of his workshop, he explained how locals regularly deliver scrap materials to his door to be reworked into something new. Nothing goes to waste—even wood chips are sanded to create necklace beads—and he never corrects errors that appear during the process. "The world needs more mistakes," Gent told me. 

Once we were back on board, the train dashed deeper into the desert, crossing the South Australian border. Motley collections of water towers, sandstone buildings, and weatherboard houses amid a sea of sun-bleached grass slid past my window as I sat down for dinner. The daily rotating menu draws from various stops along the route; that night, I was served a zesty octopus, caught in Perth and paired with chimichurri and saltbush, an herb native to arid interior plains like the ones surrounding Kalgoorlie. 

"When do we see the desert?" asked one traveler while we were finishing our meal. As if in response, the Nullarbor Plain appeared through the windows: a flat and semi-arid 77,000-square-mile expanse. This vast landscape confounded its first European explorers, who battled dehydration and disorientation in the days of Australian colonization—though the Yinyila Nation lived in this region for at least 30,000 years. We were all surprised at how full of life it was, populated with hardy scrub, birds, and reptiles even in the middle of a parched summer.

Around midnight, the train came to a stop at Cook, a lonely outpost stuck almost midway between Perth and Adelaide, originally built to support the railway. The staff invited us to step off the train and sip champagne or hot chocolate around a blazing bonfire. Enveloped by the warm glow, I looked up to find the Milky Way stretched across an enormous black canvas.

The next morning, I woke up to the aroma of coffee floating down the carriage hall and a Dalí-esque landscape outside my window. Overnight, we had crossed the dried, cracked remnants of salt lakes. The blue outline of the Flinders Ranges, the largest mountains in South Australia, now rose from the horizon like a sleeping colossus. As I ate my crispy frittata, sprightly wallabies and emus darted in and out of the bushes, seemingly attempting to race the string of railcars.

I welcomed the start of day three as a much more languid affair, with little more to do than read a book or help solve the communal 2,000-piece puzzle laid out on one of the dining tables. Intrigued by the extensive Australian wine list on board, one guest requested an impromptu tasting to fill the time. As we sipped our way through Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, and Cabernets, with a detour into a unique blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre grapes (bottled together as "GSM"), a guitarist—one of the Indian Pacific's musicians—ambled into the carriage and started to play. 

The tastings continued once we reached Adelaide in the late afternoon. Our destination was Seppeltsfield Estate . Established in 1851 in the now-award-winning Barossa Valley by German couple Joseph and Johanna Seppelt, the vineyard is home to one of Australia's most successful wine dynasties. "The Seppelts had over 100 staff who lived on-site, and the chef had to feed them every day," said current chef Owen Andrews, who works part-time at the estate. "Their whole concept of food came from Europe, and they tried to adapt what they knew to the Australian summer." Today, he continued, the vineyard's history is core to how he curates the modern menu for guests. For instance, Andrews has adopted the historic technique of preserving cheese wheels in tawny port to enhance the flavor. He's also reopened the winery's antique smokehouse to make bacon-and-smoke-infused butter. 

In the estate's Centennial Cellar were dozens of neat rows of wooden barrels, labeled with dates all the way back to 1878. (Seppeltsfield is home to one of the world's longest unbroken lines of single-vintage tawnies.) I was handed a dainty glass of tawny produced in 1925—the same year F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was published. The thick, nearly black liquid coated my tongue, delivering a knockout combination of warm spices and dried citrus.

I barely had time to recover before being whisked over to a dining hall that resembled a wedding venue: towers of roasted meats and salad piled high on white-linen-covered tables, a live band playing as we took our seats. Between courses, a master cooper treated us to a fire-barreling demonstration, unleashing tall jets of flame that shot to the ceiling and filled the air with the aroma of charred oak. 

Following this grand send-off from the winery, the Indian Pacific traveled northeast overnight, across the New South Wales border to Broken Hill, a sister mining town to Kalgoorlie. I met chef Lee Cecchin at her restaurant, the Old Saltbush , which is housed inside a 137-year-old former pub. Here, the focus is squarely on foods found in the bush. Drawing my attention to a plate of a dozen different native ingredients, Cecchin explained how they are used in creative ways: nutty wattleseed can be ground up and added to cakes; spicy pepperberry tastes delicious on gamey kangaroo steaks; cucumber-shaped finger limes, known as "the caviar of citrus" for their delicate pearls, make for a lip-smacking mojito. 

Next, Cecchin presented a delicate cloud of pavlova, the national dessert of Australia and New Zealand, and told me to decorate it. "People can be intimidated by native flavors, but the key is to have fun with it," she said as I piled my meringue with wattleseed butterscotch, Davidson's-plum coulis, and fresh berries. The sugar rush was still coursing through my veins when I arrived back at the Indian Pacific; the crash that followed came right on time, sending me to sleep to the sways of the carriage as we continued eastward through the night. 

On our final day, I saw a landscape of verdant valleys studded with grazing cattle and curious kangaroos. Before our arrival in Sydney, there would be one final stop in Blue Mountains National Park, just 90 minutes west of the city by car. When we got there, the scene was primordial: the rough-hewn sandstone escarpments were bathed in a blue haze, the result of a reaction between oils released by the eucalyptus trees that cover the valley and water vapor in the air. These ranges have gone by many European names through the years: Blue Mountains, Carmarthen Hills, Lansdowne Hills. But the original one—the one our Gundungurra guide, David King, uses—is Colomatta (pronounced gu-lum-ada ). The area was declared a national park in 1959, a decision King credits with helping to preserve his people's culture and lore.

"[When I was] growing up, the role of parents was to nurture while the aunties and uncles teach," he said as he led our small group deeper into the trees. "And a lot of the things I'm sharing with you, I was taught by my Uncle Harold." He proceeded to point out various plants used to repair weapons, ward off mosquitoes, or treat ailments. After demonstrating a song on his clapsticks, a traditional Aboriginal percussive instrument, King showed me how to crack a eucalyptus leaf in my hands. This, along with the burning of the leaf, is a sacred healing practice for the Gundungurra people. When I did it, an invigorating woodsy aroma was released, sending a happy chill down my spine. 

Our time here with King was far too brief; soon he was leading our group out of the forest to the buses waiting to whisk us back to the train. As I bid him farewell, I noted sadly that my journey would officially end in just a few hours, in Sydney. But King didn't see it that way: "In Indigenous culture, we never say goodbye—we've only just started a shared journey together."

Three-to-four-night journeys on the Indian Pacific from $2,286 per person, all-inclusive. 

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