New Zealander Gregory Hill details how a secretly nurtured passion for long-distance train travel across half the globe becomes a fascinating account in The Antipodean Express: A journey by train from New Zealand to Spain. Photo: Supplied.
What is the common denominator between Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, either of the two versions of Brief Encounter and the poet John Betjeman? The answer: they have all eternalised train journeys and helped fortify the romance of rail travel in popular culture.
The Antipodean Express is just such a narrative, written by a wittily admirable French horn player, Gregory Hill, who had secretly nurtured a passion for long-distance train travel, which he finally indulged in after he retired. He was accompanied by his German violinist wife, Anne.
Live vicariously, with some eccentric companions, as you join Gregory on this epic journey from New Zealand to Spain, undertaken almost entirely by train, and feel his intense excitement.
As the former principal player in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra elaborates, living in a country with only the most basic passenger train service, long-distance train travel was an unattainable background fantasy that briefly burst into flower in that halcyon year and a half between his career ending (retiring in 2018) and COVID-19 starting.
It was an unbelievable adventure! What Hill didn’t anticipate was that his journey would be one of the last of its kind before the pandemic and war would make such an undertaking impossible.
This was an incredible railway adventure tracing a journey from the author’s home in Wellington, New Zealand, to its exact upside or antipodes – the furthest point from it on the globe – in rural Spain. Actually, it turned out to be somewhere next to a motorway in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Salamanca and Valladolid, in the region of Castilla y Leon. The arrival of Google Earth led Hill to work out the exact coordinates of his house.
“The antipodes of our living room is in a wheatfield a couple of hundred metres north of Alaejos [an obscure Spanish village],” he explains.
He was inspired to undertake this ambitious journey by an old memory of a primary-school atlas.
“I remember it had a page with New Zealand superimposed on its upside-down antipodes, Spain. The antipodes is the place at the exact opposite point on the globe to where you are standing now.
“This wheatfield became the destination of our railway journey. It’s 13,000 kilometres away, straight through the Earth under our feet, but we travelled 38,000 kilometres to get there in 78 days; 31,000 of those kilometres covered by rail.”
The narrative recounts 89 consecutive days of travel with 33 trains through 19 countries. It begins in New Zealand’s North Island, moves on to the Red Centre of Australia, and weaves past the volcanoes of Java, through East Asia and into Europe.
From hilarious miscommunications in China to cultural immersion at the Bolshoi Ballet, there are stop-offs with half a world’s worth of impressions, people, culture, history, music and food. Hill experiences high-altitude nausea at the foot of Mt Everest, awe at Lake Baikal, artistic fulfilment at the Paris Opera and a freezing Mediterranean summer break at Cadaques.
He also describes most of the great trains of the Eurasian hemisphere, from Australia’s Indian Pacific and the Ghan to the Eurostar, and everything in between.
Well illustrated with maps and photos, The Antipodean Express is a fun armchair journey with Gregory and Anne, with musical interludes, and a vivid travel chronicle filled with surprising global insights and fascinating railway anecdotes.
A captivating travel log has been converted into an expressive reminder of the privilege and enjoyment that can be derived from setting out on a grand railway exploration. Always making sure to keep on the right track(s) – so to speak!
The Antipodean Express, by Gregory Hill, Exisle Publishing, $44.99
