ILA Magazine
Where Culture Meets Creativity
First Intrastate XPT
Ride to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia This travel story happened three years ago...
Fourteen hours running with ten stops within the New South Wales to the border and two more stops within the territory of our destination before this dolphin nosed train terminated in Roma Street. It was a fresh dawning of life's reality that age and travel knows no bounds where opportunity exists, enhanced by physical capability and mobility.
A graveyard journey is more relaxing than daytime. It gives you time alone to contemplate, to digest the silence of the night forgetting the world's travails and the vagaries of life, to embrace new experience, to welcome unexpected adventure as when and "IF HEAVEN DROPS A DATE, OPEN YOUR MOUTH" according to an Old Proverbial Wisdom.
All the way through, the bright moon shone that serves as our guide. Nothing much was seen from my window seat except the deserted mountains, and towns were covered by trees and bushes. There were few long steel bridges that connect lands where waters below were running deep and quiet in spite of the long drought we passed by. Amidst the stillness of the night, came the intrusive gentle roar of this giant blue and yellow striped land engined dolphin and curvy turns made some groovy movements heaving a rough ride.
Gladly, soon as the Food Kiosk had done its business and the staff called it a day, all lights were turned off and everyone fell asleep (so I thought), but myself immersing my soul in watching the mystifying beauty of the moon brightly beaming at my window seat. In that long reveille poetic mode, it was ironic that no words of prosaic insanity could form on my mind until sleep itself intruded my tired being.
Time went fast...we arrived our destination at last. Four-thirty wee hours in the morning...
© Leah Dancel