PRETTY AS A PICTURE
The Hungarian National Gallery (Szent Gyorgy ter 2; 0036 1 201 9082; mng.hu; open 10am-6pm) – housed across several wings of Buda Castle Palace – has enough to fill several months’ worth of Sunday mornings, with exhibitions of Hungarian art ranging from medieval stonework to contemporary painting. Don’t miss the vast, visionary canvases of the early 20th-century artist Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka, whose work drew the admiring attention of Picasso. You will find one of central Europe’s leading collections of international art at the Museum of Fine Arts (Dozsa Gyorgy ut 41; 0036 1 469 7100; szepmuveszeti.hu; open 10am5.30pm), with its Old Picture Gallery containing masterpieces by Raphael, Titian, Brueghel and many others.
The Indian Pacific isn’t the longest train journey in the world – there are two in China and one in Canada that are slightly longer, and one in Russia that is much longer. But it may be the greatest of them all.
WHY IT’S SPECIAL
There is a clue in the name. The Indian Pacific runs for 2,735 miles in an almost straight line from Perth to Sydney – from one side of Australia to the other, west coast to east coast, Indian Ocean to Pacific Ocean. That is from left to right if you are looking at a map, though you are of course free to do it the other way round if you prefer, Pacific Indian. Whichever direction you go, the journey lasts four days and three nights. Although there are lush, thickly eucalyptus-scented sections, as when you pass through the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, most of the journey is spent traversing dead-flat desert – including the Nullarbor Plain, so utterly featureless that it is almost like an experiment in sensory deprivation.
What’s that you say – a bit samey? Far from it. Bleak, magnificent, disorienting, astounding, relentless, even rather terrifying on some obscure, hard-toarticulate existential level – but never, ever boring. This is wilderness that just goes on and on. You go to sleep in the wilderness. You wake up in the wilderINSIDER
ness. You seldom stop moving yet you spend all day every day in the wilderness, for the best part of a working week. There are few places left on Earth where you can do this. The 19th-century English explorer Edward John Eyre called it “the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams”. A touch hysterical. But it is definitely the sort of place that gets into your dreams.
YOU’LL NEVER FORGET…
The sense of scale. Sit back and watch the world go by and meditate on whatever comes to mind – humankind’s fleeting, laughable puniness in the face of nature and eternity, perhaps.
TIP
Pick another time to quit drinking. There can be few more congenial settings in which to blow the froth off a cold one and strike up a conversation with your fellow travellers – mostly retired Australians and therefore blueribbon raconteurs – than in the lounge car of the Indian Pacific.
HOW TO DO IT
Qantas (qantas.com/gb/en.html) flies direct from the UK to Perth in 17 hours. Book the Indian Pacific at greatsouthernrail.com.au.