Rolling across the landscape - the rail journey up to Sydney

It is now 12.20pm and we are coasting through the Victorian countryside.

I've been aboard this train since 09.05am and wont get off until 8.00pm tonight and to be honest my patience is being sorely tested.

One amazing thing about Australia is that you have for tens of miles no sign of human habitation at all. No fences, no houses, no roads.

Have you ever stood in a queue in a queue and noticed a badly behaved famly and prayed that they are sitting nowhere near you? And of course, because you have done something to offend the gods, they are assigned seats in your immediate vicinity. Some special offenders and their sprogs were sent to torment me and the rest of the passengers on the mammoth journey across Victoria and New South Wales to Sydney. I was caught between a set of children who got bored after the first hour and decided to cause havoc making the train attendants see to them continually. They were behind me.

Ahead of me were a racuous family of two teenage mums and their aggressive matriarch. They were unable to control their kids and created scene after scene. One of the little boys clambered on the reserved seat behind him and spilt orange juice on the fabric. When an old girl got on at Albury she found she couldnt use the seat and had to be reseated away from her husband. The $110 ticket to Sydney was now useless. Carriage D was getting a bad reputation up and down the train.

But mainly I watched the Australian countryside glide by. We moved not at an excessive rate but a steady one. Outside the window was green Victorian countryside. I was told I was very lucky to see it so green - as in summer it is parched yellow. But they had been blessed with rain recently and it looked almost Elysian. One amazing thing about Australia is that you have for tens of miles no sign of human habitation at all. No fences, no houses, no roads. There are farm animals spread over the landscape but other then that it is completely untouched.

It all started this morning when I took 'The Loop' to Spencer Street (soon to become Southern Cross station in tune for the 2006 Commonwealth games) and joined to exodus of people down the platform to Carriage D. For the first five hours I had a very polite young Tamil man next to me. He left at Albury and sitting next to me was Ken from Darwin. I loved Ken. For a start he went and told the pikey family to keep their kids under control getting him a round of applause from the other passengers.Then he sat and chatted to me for the next six hours telling me stories of the Outback.

He was on a three week jaunt taking in Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth before flying back to Darwin. He was a friendly little widower who was interested in meeting foreigners and chatted to me about London. He used to raise possums and joeys before letting them back into the wild. And he was so successful that they used to visit him ten years later. I got a real feel of what it was like to live in the Outback from him.

The Australians on this trip have been a revelation. Lovely people.

We were late getting into Sydney. The whole thing was taking 13 hours instead of 11. I said goodbye to Ken at Campbelltown where he got off and we clanked into Sydney Central station at 10 at night. I hit the taxi rank with everyone else and got a Vietnamese driver who did not know the way to Newtown. I had to get my map out of the boot to show him. The Australian Sunrise Lodge sounds idyllic. When I got there it was padlocked to the nines and a Chinese woman took my details. The hotel feels like it is the constant target of burglars there was so much security.

Also on this wet spring night it was pretty empty. I saw only three people during my three day stay. A strange hotel catering for and run by ghosts.