My First Ride on a Train

My name is Alice Thompson. I come from Sydney, Australia and I’m 18 years old. Recently I had my first ride on a long-distance train. And what a ride! A friend and I traveled on the famous Ghan train. We got on in Sydney and we got off in Alice Springs, right in the middle of Australia, more than four thousand kilometers away. We spent two days and nights on the train.

The train was wonderful and the food was great. We ate great meals cooked by experts! For the first few hundred kilometres of the journey, the scenery was very colourful. There were fields and the soil was dark red. After that, it was desert. The sun shone, there was no wind and there were no clouds in the sky. Suddenly, it looked like a place from another time. We saw abandoned farms which were built more than a hundred years ago.

The train was comfortable and the people were nice. During the day, I sat and looked out of the window, and sometimes talked to other passengers. I read books and listened to my Chinese cassettes (I'm studying Chinese at school). One night,at about midnight, I watched the night sky for about an hour. The stars shone like diamonds.

Why is the train called the Ghan? A long time ago, Australians needed a way to travel to the middle of the country.They tried riding horses, but the horses didn't like the hot weather and sand A hundred and fifty years ago, they brought some camels from Afghanistan. Ghan is short for Afghanistan.

Camels were much better than horses for travelling a long distance. For many years, trained camels carried food and other supplies, and returned with wool and other products.

The Afghans and their camels did this until the 1920s. Then the government built a new railway line, so they didn't need the camels any more. In 1925,they passed a law which allowed people to shoot the animals if they were a problem. In 1935, the police in a town shot 153 camels in one day.