MY TRAVEL JOURNEY
On the Ghan with Benjamin Law
Embarking on a cross-generational family journey, Benjamin Law recounts his “wild” adventure aboard the legendary Ghan, ticking off a bucket-list experience with his mum.
WORDS Benjamin Law
Honestly, my mum and I have been on some crazy trips together over the years. Picture a tiny Chinese-Australian woman and her inner-city adult gay kid travelling by campervan for over 1,000 kilometres between Alice Springs (Mparntwe), Kings Canyon (Watarrka) and Uluru. Or the time we accompanied a small TV crew to find Mum’s ancestral homelands in Southern China for an ABC documentary, with half the village coming out to greet and celebrate us. The whole thing felt like a hallucination, and I’d insist it was if there wasn’t video footage to prove it. When Mum and I travel together, we go big.
In the lead-up to her 70th birthday, though, Mum said there was still one more wild mother–son trip she wanted to tackle together: The Ghan. Australia’s most iconic train, The Ghan carves up close to 3,000 kilometres through the middle of the continent, and it had been on Mum’s bucket list for years.
But here’s where I admit The Ghan wasn’t on my bucket list at all. Trains are my favourite way to travel in the world (I constantly daydream about the sleepers in India), but wasn’t The Ghan more for … old people? What did it offer for someone who was still relatively young and in his early 40s (yes, technically middle-aged and a geriatric millennial)? Wouldn’t I get bored? And given it travels along a lot of empty land, what, exactly, was there to see? Still, filial piety and existential guilt go a long way in Chinese culture, and I wasn’t about to let her go alone. We booked a cabin each for the three-night Adelaide (Tarntanya)-to-Darwin (Garramilla) journey.
After boarding the Ghan in Adelaide, it became clear my expectations were (happily) wrong. Views from the train were shockingly beautiful: lush oil painting-like scenes of red dirt, horizonless land and infinite sky.
We stopped for morning sunrise breakfasts in the endless desert of Marla. Every day had a new adventure – literally. Off Train Experiences included birdwatching in Alice Springs Desert Park, and a tour of Aboriginal rock art via a Nitmiluk gorge cruise led by local Jawoyn youth.
The ingenuity of the carriages themselves were delightful – old-school glamour with modern Australian engineering – and super-comfortable. At every point, access and activities were designed to suit all levels of ability, disability and mobility. In a way, the Ghan almost felt custom-made for multi-generational family journeys.
But the thing that shocked these two foodies the most was the Ghan’s menu. Instead of decent plane-style food, every meal was the quality you’d expect of Michelin-starred restaurants, with each plate thoughtfully curated to sustainably match our environment. Think: delicate kangaroo fillets; Asian-style dumplings plump with crocodile meat; massaman curry, made with water buffalo – a feral invasive species we should all be eating more. We were also stunned – in a good way – by how every passenger had access to bottomless drinks from a fully stocked list of premium wines, beers, ciders and soft drinks. Discovering everything was all-inclusive was like a religious experience. In fact, “all-inclusive” is now my personal safe word.
By the end, I was completely Ghan-pilled. I bought the merch (the updated range – classic and classy – is the brainchild of a former R.M. Williams alumnus) and I wear my red corduroy cap not just like a souvenir, but because it legitimately looks great. For months afterwards, I was the Ghan guy from Instagram because I couldn’t stop posting about it. Friends would ask me, “How was the Ghan?” and even if it was mostly rhetorical, I would pummel them with my favourite facts of the journey until I could tell they were, too, converted and put it on their bucket list. As for me, I’m now putting The Ghan’s longer sister journey – the Indian Pacific – on mine.
