On the Sunlander Train

(This is the third of four posts that I have accumulated over the last few days.)

4 May
Sunlander Train
Sunny and warm

At the moment, we are pulling into Ayr, a small stop a couple hours south of Townsville. It's about 7:30, so the train is on schedule for the most part -- it may be a little bit behind. But the train ride has been most comfortable, long enough to get us well into the tropics, short enough so that we'll have most of the day before us when we arrive on Magnetic Island.

The Sunlander runs service from Brisbane to Cairns twice a week, on Sundays and Tuesdays. It offers dining services, a club car, and seating cars in addition to the sleepers we use. The sleepers that the students are in are triple berths with a long sofa that folds into two beds; the third one folds down from the top. They are a little narrow, but quite comfortable. My room is a single in the next car. It's smaller than theirs, of course, but still quite nice.

We boarded the train yesterday at Maryborough West. Maryborough is a large city a little ways inland from Hervey Bay, so my assumption was that the station was on the west side of the city, and that we would have some time to visit some surrounding shops and perhaps pick up a meal. But Maryborough West is far west of the city, essentially in the countryside. So, no lunch until we were on board.

The students took their second quiz and turned in their course journals. They are doing quite well. I designed the quizzes to test whether they are paying attention to the tour guides and travel experiences, so I'm pretty confident that they are taking from the course what I hoped they would. We still have a ways to go, of course.

As we ride along, we pass field after field of sugar cane, a major crop of Queensland. The fields are a few weeks away from being harvested; I doubt that the course timing will ever permit us to witness that. Of course, these days they do not burn the fields as they did in the past, but rather use the leaves and other trash generated by the harvesting to help fuel the refineries. This results in a lot less pollution -- and a lower chance of bush fires.

There's a lot of wildlife to see out the windows. I've seen some kangaroos, and a lot of birds: cattle egrets, bustards, birds of prey, lorikeets. One of the students saw a wombat waddling by a roadside during a slow spot. I have not talked to everyone yet, so I'll be interested to hear what else they noticed.

We should be arriving in Townsville shortly, and the it's on to Magnetic Island.