Day 6 and 7: train ride and Perth

This morning we woke up and were escorted to the highway at Wilcannia where we turned right onto it to take us back to Broken Hill to catch the train. I had an afternoon to spend in Broken Hill before the train left so I used it to view the little sights they had in the town. The places there such as the pub has been used in many movie like Mad Max 2 because it had the sense of being in the middle of nowhere even though it wasn’t. Broken Hill is a very prosperous mining town with an air of business like that of a 1940’s town in America. We stooped to look at one of the large hotels called Mario’s Palace Hotel, which had a bar with cold beer, TV, a grand entrance, and a large wraparound balcony on the second floor. The next day we caught the second Indian Pacific train to Perth and looked at a map to see how far we had traveled in our car. To our surprise we had only covered a very small part of the continent even though it felt like we had been travelling forever. There is not very much to do on the train except eat and watch the vast expanses of the outback pass by and focus on little things. The next day we arrived in Perth and reflected on the fact that we just did something very few Australians had done.