Word: outbacker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...carsick, a used car might work. Of course, used cars are less expensive, and insuring them costs less. Sure, a used number carries more risks, but in this certified-preowned-vehicle era, a model that has historically retained its value - say, a Honda Accord EX or a Subaru Outback - can often promise years of strong, relatively maintenance-free driving...
...cured them. After all, if he never bet against conventional wisdom, Murdoch would still be the proud owner of the Barrier Miner - the local paper of the outback town of Broken Hill, Australia - and nothing else...
...kangaroo accidentally gets hit by the train, you don't really feel it," conductor Scott Fels informs me as the scrublands and giant termite mounds of the Australian Outback whisk by. "But if the train drivers see a camel on the tracks, believe me, they get away from the windows...
...Camels in the Outback? Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel caravans led by Afghan drivers in the 1860s and 1870s. It was these migrant cameleers who helped opened up the continent's arid interior to travelers. The country's most famous train, the Ghan, www.gsr.com.au, is named in their honor. (See pictures of Australia's hidden islands...
...Ghan's tracks were first laid in the 1880s, the entire line wasn't fully completed (on an upgraded track) until 2004, and at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Now, luxury trains up to one kilometer long, sometimes numbering 52 carriages, crawl through the forbidding primordial stretches of Outback twice a week, like giant high-speed caterpillars. It's a seemingly endless landscape of Martian redness, and to be able to enjoy it all from a private Platinum cabin - while taking high tea served to you by a personal butler - is a curious lesson in the persistence and ingenuity...