Had Chester been a car, I might have said his wheels needed aligning. But Chester was a camel, and I was on his back, perched on top of a metal-framed hammock-type saddle, undulating wildly with every small step he took on the sandy soil that is sometimes a riverbed. Camels
certainly sway more than horses.
I was staring into the back of the photographer who was riding Chester with me, as we set out from Alice Springs to watch the dawn from camel back.
With all due respect to Chester, I couldn't quite see the point. Sunrise over the Australian Outback would have been as memorably haunting and moving viewed while standing, or from a four-wheel-drive or quad bike. The amazingly translucent white bark of the ghost eucalyptus, would have shone as brightly. The silence of this ancient land would have been as profound.
The back of a camel is an incredibly uncomfortable place to be. But for a writer it provides a wonderful symmetry; a historic and symbolic link to where this journey began, the day before, in Adelaide.
Adelaide is a gentle, gracious city that always seems to be bursting with possibility and at the same time harbouring dreadful secrets, such as the macabre murders that punctuate its history.
It's on the edge of an ocean that seems to stretch forever, and at the end of a continent that does the same. The train tracks heading north beckon you into the mysterious and inhospitable interior of Australia.
Back before there was rail, the only way into the interior was on camels - beasts and their masters imported from Afghanistan for just that reason.
When the camels had lugged enough railway sleepers, food and water into the desert to build a railway track replacing the need for camel trains, they were left to roam the Outback, without any check on their fertility. Their number is now estimated at around 700,000.
The train that runs on the tracks they helped build was named after the Afghans, shortened in typical Australian style but more commonly pronounced in a very un-Australian way as "garn".
So there I was in Adelaide, about to board the train that runs on the tracks laid with the help of Chester's ancestors. The last rays of sunset were bouncing off the silver carriages - all 28 of them taking up 1.4km of track - as the locomotives hummed into life.
There is something romantic about trains. Maybe it's the long, narrow corridors down which you might imagine conspirators tip-toeing between cabins. Maybe it's the splendid privacy of the cabins themselves (we were travelling Gold Kangaroo Class, meaning a twin-sleeper with wardrobes, shower and toilet). Maybe it's the way the bar carriage looks like it might have come from the set of a cowboy movie; ditto the dining carriage. Maybe it's just the seductiveness of a fine meal, with fine wine and fine service while, out the window in the darkness, Australia speeds by.
Port Augusta, the last town before Alice Springs, disappeared behind its shimmering lights. At some point in the darkness we crossed the 32nd parallel where the Outback starts and beyond which only 1 per cent of South Australia's population lives.
Showering in a train that rocks in much the same way as Chester does takes some concentration. So does sleeping. At 5am there was nothing to be seen through the window except the blackness.
Then slowly the horizon came into relief, the saltbush took on a faint outline and before long the sun was blazing down on the red earth.
Not that it was boring, at least not to a New Zealander struggling with the concept of how vast, unchanging and uninhabited this continent is. Once there was a kangaroo, twice an emu, occasionally an upturned car wreck that might tell of some horrible outback death, sometimes the pylons from a radio relay station, once the Stuart Highway.
Then, by lunchtime, the sinister white domes of the American spy station at Pine Gap loomed into view and, finally Alice Springs, the town made famous by Neville Shute long ago. What used to be made fun of as "the dead centre of Australia" until the marketers rebranded it "the red centre" is a cowboy sort of town with a number of surprisingly posh-looking new hotels.
What you see everywhere in Alice Springs is what you surprisingly see so few of in Australia's southern cities: Aborigines.
They sit in groups under trees in dried-up river beds - it hasn't rained in Alice Springs for two years - as though they are as comfortable on the land as the kangaroo and the emu. They stroll the streets more readily, it seems, than Alice's white people. And on Sunday mornings they sell their distinctive colourful art in the town's central market, not far from the local nightclub, where the dress code is described as "neat and tidy or bugger orf" and to which the local cowboys will drive all day Saturday, just to have a beer or two on their day off.
These days the Ghan continues on to Darwin, which may be robbing Alice Springs of some of its tourist income. Uluru, or Ayers Rock, and the neighbouring Olgas are still a four-hour drive away.
We flew over these icons, courtesy of the Flying Doctor service. And from the air the empty, arid vastness is even more pronounced. You start to fancy you see lakes that may have been in the past, and an ocean on the horizon where there is none.
We left Alice again the next afternoon by air, landing in Auckland three days after flying out - yes from New Zealand you can do the Ghan to Alice Springs in a three-day weekend. The Afghans would be amazed.
* Jan Corbett travelled on The Ghan courtesy of Great Southern Railways.
The Ghan fares
* Adelaide to Alice Springs: Gold Kangaroo Service A$890 ($963)
* Red Kangaroo Service Sleeper cabin A$680 ($736)
* Red Kangaroo Service day-night seat A$215 ($232)
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