Getting tourism back on the rails

By ERWIN CHLANDA

For most people travelling is a means to an end – getting somewhere.

For us in the vastness of outback Australia it’s an end in itself, an adventure, a buzz, something you brag about to your mates.

You may be a Japanese conquering the Stuart Highway’s 1226 km between Port Augusta and Alice Springs, gathering brownie points for the afterlife, saying “I want walk” if you offer him a lift.

On the opposite end is luxuriating in the five star hotel on rails, The Ghan, named after the Afghans who were doing it on camels. It may well have the formula for rescuing our ailing tourism industry.

Dinner at the Telegraph Station.

And of course the quintessential travellers, nomadic Aboriginal people have been doing this for 65,000 years, on foot traversing the unforgiving country, creating databases in their heads about food and water, ample if you know where they are, as well as formulating the laws of complex political and social systems of land possession and responsibility.

One thing this big country is not: Empty.

My trip on the Ghan started with expectations shaped by fares such as $8300 for a Platinum ticket Darwin to Adelaide per person one way.

Setting off in Alice Springs for Adelaide I expected to be in the company of multi millionaires if not billionaires at a starlight dinner (regrettably it was cloudy) at the Overland Telegraph Station.

Journey Beyond, the company running The Ghan, is leasing this prime historical site from NT Parks, including the precinct and trail station cafe.

I sat next to the retired head of a medium size company’s HR section.

“Are you a millionaire,” I probed, hesitantly.

“No. These people are workers. They saved and now they are here.”

A look around confirmed this: Mostly middle-class retired couples, clearly having made friends on the trip from Darwin. This is a much friendlier bunch than I expected.

Lunch in a dugout.

That is subtly encouraged by Journey Beyond. The meals (mains – Black Angus grain fed sirloin or chicken roulade; sides – herbed roasted potatoes, glazed baby vegetables, native pepper jus, medley leaf salad with balsamic dressing) were served in dishes to share: “Care for another steak? Pass the potatoes, please” can be handy conversation starters.

A similar strategy was in place when we had lunch in a dugout in Coober Pedy the following day, 12 metres under ground in excavated rooms with ochre coloured rock walls and ceilings, a former opal mine.

During the dinner the night before Ghan passengers did rounds of the historic buildings and watched the blacksmith forging bottle openers from Old Ghan rail spikes.

Local band Hard Beat’s middle-of-the-road gig soon had the dance floor buzzing.

A conga line formed behind a member of the train staff, the people universally praised by the travellers I spoke with.

No Sir this, Madam that. No white gloves.

It’s first names, right from boarding.

“When we recruit staff our first question is, do you like people,” says Turkish-born train manager Zafer Tasci, looking after 211 passengers in a train that’s nearly a kilometre long.

The 14 hour working days do not put the staff off, I was told by several of them, because after a week’s work they get a full week off.

Our train was sectioned into four “bubbles” each with four to six carriages, a lounge car and a dining car.

The rooms – too big to call them cabins – have two single or one double bed which are made into comfortable lounge chairs during the day. There is an ensuite. After flushing a jet squirts two short puffs of deodorant into the toilet bowl. Nothing is left to chance.

I found sleeping blissful. The rails are welded, no little gaps which caused the conventional klonk-klonk, klnonk-klonk. There is just that gentle rocking.

The Ghan is probably the only way to cross a continent on the ground without touching your credit card. Absolutely everything is provided. Drinks and nibbles in abundance. Even in the bush destinations are little stalls set up with Bollinger champagne, beer and soft drinks.

A flute of Bollinger in your room as you first board. Care for a night cup? Whiskey, please. Sure enough, you return from you evening “off-train experience” and there it is.

The Breakaways near Coober Pedy

In Alice Springs these experiences include the West MacDonnells beauty spots Simpson’s Gap and Standley Chasm. In Coober Pedy, the Breakaways north-east of town, the superb underground Serbian Orthodox Church of Saint Elijah the Prophet and the opal mining museum, the latter providing some “free time” which is a synonymous for opportunity to buy some colourful gems. (Here the credit card does come in handy.)

Off-train experiences are undertaken in Journey Beyond’s own coaches.

They start from the safety of the train and end there.

Mr Tasci, who describes The Ghan as a cruise liner on rails, says the company of course doesn’t stop passengers from doing their own thing – but it is not encouraged.

If they are wandering around Alice Springs “we can’t guarantee their safety. We like them to stay with our tours”.

And here is the kind of thing why. Police report September 16, 2024, three days before my train overnighted in Alice: “At about 5:00am on Sunday, four males unlawfully entered a hotel room while the occupant was asleep, stealing alcohol and personal belongings.

“Shortly after, the same group allegedly unlawfully entered an occupied room at another nearby hotel. One of the offenders was reportedly armed with a machete during the second incident.”

While tourists are staying away in droves, fearing for their safety, and driven by hysterical Facebook rubbish, Journey Beyond may well have the formula for bringing them back.

The company was bought by the US Hornblower Group for a reported $600m in 2022. It was Australia’s largest experiential tourism business.

Acquisitions since 2015 had included Cruise Whitsundays and Rottnest Express, the Eureka Tower Skydeck, Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures, Outback Spirit Tours and Darwin Harbour Cruises.

The company is now under sole ownership of New York based private equity firm Crestview Partners which has a reported $10 billion in capital commitments.

Journey Beyond has a separate capital structure in Australia and its own sources of funding, according to a spokesperson.

The firm is clearly on the go with the recent acquisition of Vintage Rail Journey “immersing guests with the breathtaking landscape of NSW [in] the state’s Golden West, the Riverina Rail Tour into Australia’s ‘food bowl’, Northern NSW coast, as well as special event trips to the Elvis Festival in Parkes and the Bathurst 1000,” says the blurb.

Opportunities for Alice Springs clearly include enticing Ghan passengers to break the journey here and resuming it on the next service – or the one after.

The Staircase to Heaven near Standley Chasm.

A spokeswoman says “Australia’s leading experiential tourism group” operates 16 brands spanning the nation, “connecting guests to the land, and to each other”.

Headquartered in Adelaide, Journey Beyond was formed in 2016 and now comprises tourism brands including: Iconic trains The Ghan, Indian Pacific, Great Southern, The Overland and Vintage Rail Journeys; premium small-group outback operator Outback Spirit; eco-luxe lodge Sal Salis Ningaloo Reef; aquatic adventures Cruise Whitsundays, Rottnest Express, the Paspaley Pearl Farm Tour, Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures, Darwin Harbour Cruises and Journey Beyond Cruise Sydney, Melbourne Skydeck and Eureka 89, the historic Vintage Rail Journeys and the Telegraph Station in Alice Springs.

The Ghan has 75 carriages operating both weekly services from April to October, including crew, luggage and power vans.

In Alice Springs are five road coaches and eight in Coober Pedy.

There are 75 employees across Darwin and Alice terminals and coaches, plus six crews of 45 team members rotating through the Ghan.

Journey Beyond Rail has 584 employees across all rail operations and about 1600 employees for all of the company.

In Alice it has around 30 to 40 suppliers and across the Ghan around 80 in total.

Bradley Campbell, General Manager Rail Operations says: “Suppliers we have worked with in Alice over the last 10 years include Standley Chasm, Earth Sanctuary, Pyndan Camel Tracks, School of the Air, Reptile Centre and Tailormade Tours.”

The underground Serbian Orthodox Church of Saint Elijah the Prophet.

Next time maybe you break the Ghan trip in Alice Springs, head bush in a 4WD, nicking off from the “bitumen” down a dirt track as the sun sets, throwing your swag in a dry creek, cooking on a small fire and before you close your eyes, being overwhelmed by the endless number of stars in a sky that couldn’t be any clearer.

Who knows, Journey Beyond may branch out into that as well.

Or fly at 10,000 feet in a light aircraft, chart on your knees, ticking off landmarks which are rare – hills and creeks and major roads, not minor ones because they come and go in a landscape whose age is measured in millions of years.

Not arriving but “gettin there” is what it’s all about, yarned about under a tree in the savannah or desert as big as a European country, or in a pub, caravan park, around the campfire.

Or at a BBQ when you get home to that small, crowded rest of Australia “down south”.

PHOTO AT TOP: The rail siding Manguri is one of the journey’s oddities. It is as close as the train gets to Coober Pedy, 40 km away, although the town is the only settlement of any size between Alice Springs and Port Augusta. A local myth, according to one resident, is that the $1.6 billion railway line was not welcome by a handful of business people in the town. And so passengers from and to the opal mining capital are subjected to a bumpy ride on a corrugated dirt road to get access to what was compared to the Snowy System in terms of importance to the nation and its taxpayers.

Images by Alice Springs News and Journey Beyond.

UPDATE October 2, 2024:

Danial Rochford, CEO of Tourism Central Australia, provided the following comment:

Visitors tell us day in day out about the incredible experiences they have in Central Australia. Whether it is travelling on The Ghan, exploring the Larapinta trail or visiting vibrant Alice Springs to experience all the amazing attractions, visitors are having an awesome time.

We appreciate all the work our industry are doing to make sure our visitors have the best experience possible.

Tourism Central Australia also welcome the Government’s efforts to enhance community safety through increased police presence and measures to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour.