The Indian Pacific Railway

Our train ride from Sydney to Adelaide was a beautiful experience. Traveling by train allowed us the luxury of reading while the 1400 kilometers sped effortlessly past the windows. We left Sydney in the afternoon and watched the sun set upon the Blue Mountains. When the sun rose again we were greeted by kangaroos racing along beside the train and vast stretches of flat, scrubby outback.

Near the outback town of Broken Hill a recorded announcement described the largest freshwater lake in Australia and that we were about to pass it. Immediately after the recording, the conductor came on and explained that the large expanse of scrubby trees to our left was what used to be the lake. The drought (or climate change) in Australia has completely dried the lake up. Where before we would have been looking out on boats fishing, there were now trees and bushes.

As we crossed over into the state of South Australia the emptiness of the outback began to be replaced with farmlands and sheep and cattle pastures. The brown, scruffy country turned to green, manicured farms. Both are beautiful in their own ways.

I guess the only problem with the train is the rather poor sleeping accommodations in the cheap seats. (Have I mentioned yet that I got bored of shaving)

Mekayla’s Birthday Cake: Not Just a Dessert, an Experience

The real reason we rented a cottage for a few days in the Blue Mountains was so that we would have an oven in which to bake a cake.

For those who are unaware, Mekayla has a birthday tradition of creating a differently shaped cake every year. This year she chose a platypus. And as if sculpting a cake into a platypus wasn’t difficult enough she also decided that the “cake” should be a chocolate bread pudding since we are partaking in a fair bit of British inspired culture these days.

Of course, neither of us has ever made a bread pudding before (though we did eat one our Servas hosts made up in Queensland). Our kitchen also turned out to be lacking in a few areas: a rather deficient baking pan, metric measurements in the recipe but nothing to measure them with, an oven in Celcius which didn’t measure temperature correctly anyways. Oh, and this being a recipe of Mekayla’s obviously meant we had to find a way to add fruit to it.

It turned out pretty well despite the limitations. In the end we think that there was not enough pudding for the amount of bread we ended up using. The top layer of bread was much too dry. On the second day we just started removing the top layer and eating the bottom layers of fruit and bread. These were quite delicious.

At some point we need to find some willing soul who really knows how to make bread pudding and is willing to teach us. Also chocolate bread pudding seems like it might be some bastardization of a real bread pudding. The real thing seems like it should not have any chocolate in it, but for a birthday cake I think the chocolate is very necessary.

Happy 28th Birthday

We spent Mekayla’s birthday yesterday the way all good birthdays should be spent: camping! We started off the camping season camping on Cape Cod for my birthday, and now we’ve gotten rather adept at it after having camped about 23 of the past 30 nights. Pretty good start to our year in the wild.

Although my posts are still a bit behind the times we’re now down on the outskirts of the Blue Mountains about 250 km west of Sydney. We stayed at Dunn’s Swamp which despite the name is an amazingly beautiful area where an ancient river carved deep troughs into the surrounding sandstone.

We had gotten a little worried before we got here that it was going to be rather cold (after one night where it dropped down to freezing). But the weather has actually improved as we went more south and spring is beginning to show us some of the great Australian wildflowers that we have read about. And never fear parents, our sleeping bags and tent are holding up exceptionally well in the weather.

Today we are heading up into the Blue Mountains where we have rented a cottage for a more extended celebration of Mekayla’s birthday for the next four days. Then it will be on to Sydney and on the 19^th we are taking a train ride to Adelaide.

I guess the way to end this post is to finish off with some pictures of the birthday girl.

We had pancakes with chocolate melted on them for breakfast.

Map of Our Progress

We've added a map of our progress on the right hand side of the blog page with our itinerary.

You can also see it here: Map of Progress.

We've now entered New South Wales! It is still raining.