It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  With our taxi not technically road-legal and the windscreen spiderwebbed with cracks, we tried desperately to look cool and not to draw attention as the cab slowly pulled through Darwin.

  Even though we were covered for third-party damage in Australia on our insurance policy from home, legally we were only allowed to drive to or from a mechanic's without the MOT. So we did the only thing we could do and booked ourselves into a mechanic's and set off to get the car fixed.

  Ahead of us lay the famous Outback. Ridiculously hot and unrelentingly inhospitable, stories were always surfacing about tourists going missing out there. The mechanical voice of the satnav rang out, 'Continue straight for five-hundred-and-sixty miles, then turn left…'

  Nobody said the mechanic had to be in Darwin.

  CHAPTER 44

  ALWAYS TIP YOUR MECHANIC WELL

  The roads were good, the scenery was unexpectedly green and bushy, and the engine was running well (well, in fifth gear anyway). Stocked up with three days' worth of water and supplies, we camped in a national park with famous swimming holes. We rose at sunrise for a quick dip in the clear waters, nervously avoiding the deep black bits for fear of the crocodiles. Although apparently there were none in the area, as soon as someone mentions it, you just get that little bit nervous and make up excuses as to why you're sitting in the shallows.

  Australian birds are stupid. I can now comment with a fair amount of authority on international bird behaviour as a 1992 black cab drives towards them (although this is hardly the best speciality topic for Mastermind). Whereas most birds fly out of the way, Australian birds fly straight up and hover around the cab windscreen, blindly waiting to be hit. Leigh hit a small one on the drive to the campsite, which fuelled an evening of relentless bird-murdering jokes from his unsympathetic teammates.

  As Johno was driving out from our camp spot, a much larger bird decided to play chicken (no pun intended) with the cab. There was a screech of brakes (or there would have been if they worked) and a momentous thud as irony struck. Johno and I in the front seats rose from behind the dashboard, where we had instinctively ducked, to find that our previously cracked windscreen had been damaged to the point where we couldn't see through it. Leigh was laughing away in the back seat at the karma he had just witnessed. The culprit-turned-victim, a bush pheasant, about the same size as an English pheasant, lay very dead, by the roadside. Fortunately the driver's side of the screen was clear, but with the nearest settlement 60 miles away, and the chances of them having a spare London taxi windscreen slim, we were forced to push on to Cairns in an even worse state than before.

  Until you have driven in the Outback, it is difficult to really get a grasp of the true desolation. The country is vast; the roads are straight and go on for as far as the eye can see, blending into a hazy mirage when they meet the sky. Dead wallabies and kangaroo litter the roadside every few miles, mown down by the huge 'roo-bars' attached to the front of buses and road trains. Huge termite mounds stand like pillars beside the road, along with the occasional derelict wind-powered water-pump at some longforgotten cattle station. The heat pounded down as we drove for about 12 hours every day.

  Drive, stop, camp, repeat.

  The process was only interrupted by the odd 'road train' every few hours. They're about 50 m long and consist of three articulated trucks bolted together that thunder along at 70 mph. These monsters are downright intimidating, especially as they cruised faster than our top speed and overtook us on roads barely wide enough for them, shoving us into a nerve-wracking battle to hold the line with half the cab on the road and the other in the dust.

  Every day we drove through scorched desert scrub, every night a huge thunderstorm raged. This was typical luck for us. Rain in the desert; yet again we cursed our bloody single-skin pop-up tents, thoroughly fed up with being perpetually moist.

  We eventually made it to Cairns, and realised that all the hard sections were finished; all we had to do was drive to Sydney. We were on the home straight and in a jovial mood. This was allied with the near-confirmation of a new sponsor getting on board and the chance to extend the trip beyond Sydney.

  We arrived in Cairns looking feral and smelling worse, but our interviews with various Australian TV channels throughout Asia had come up with an unexpected benefit. The hostel company Base had offered to put us up in their establishments for free all the way down the coast and what's more they had mentioned, 'We often have wet T-shirt compos. D'ya wanna be pourers lads?'

  If we had translated this correctly it definitely sounded like a good idea for three red-blooded 20-something males – although not so much for Leigh, whose girlfriend had flown out from the UK to visit him for the final leg.

  With Hannah safely in the hands of a seemingly friendly mechanic, we went to explore the nightlife. One of our friends from back in the UK happened to be in the same town and before long our catch up had degenerated into one of those nights similar to the one that spawned the whole stupid taxi idea in the first place. Paul jumped up on our table and danced for approximately eight seconds before a bouncer appeared.

  'Get the bloody-hell darn from there mate, where'd y'think you are, the bloody Woolshed?'

  'The Woolshed? What's that?'

  'It's the pub where everyone dances on the tables, mate!'

  'Where's that?' the entire group chorused.

  It turned out the Woolshed was only a few streets down and even had little shelves high on the wall of the pub designed to hold your drink while you boogied on the tabletops.

  Now that the sponsorship with GetTaxi was looking more like a dead cert and we knew that Hannah had to go further than the 1,300-mile push down to Sydney, we got Brando the mechanic to work hard on getting her in shape. To say thanks, we went to his with a couple of crates of Oz's finest Castlemaine XXXX beer.

  Six months later, we received an email from Queensland Police. It turned out that our helpful mechanic had murdered two of his customers; a couple who had taken their vintage camper van into his garage for some work. The details were sketchy but what we did know for certain was that Brando was in custody and refusing to tell the police where the bodies were. An Internet sleuth had tracked down the blog we wrote about that afternoon, and passed the details on to the police who now wanted to question us about the photos Brando had shown us of his two-year-old daughter holding a .22 pistol.

  It later emerged that the couple had paid Brando thousands of dollars to restore their beloved van but he had spent the money on himself instead. When they had disputed things he killed them, shooting the man in the back of the head and stabbing his partner before dumping their bodies on the edge of the rainforest. He was convicted 18 months later and given two life sentences with a minimum of 30 years behind bars. We were suddenly awfully glad we hadn't got on the wrong side of him.

  We headed south for a spate of reunions with old friends. Lila, a friend from university, and Leigh's girlfriend, Char, joined us in the cab for a few days. My parents had flown over to see us briefly before the big arrival in Sydney. Once in Brisbane, we found ourselves at a press event arranged by the dean from Queensland University of Technology – a partner institution to our old university, Aston – who we had met on the day we left campus. Unlikely as it had sounded nine and a half months earlier, he had promised us a big celebration including all the tea and scones we could scoff upon our arrival.

  The jovial mood was further reinvigorated when we received an email; GetTaxi had signed the contract: we were not finishing in Sydney. We were now circumnavigating the world!

  CHAPTER 45

  THE END IS NOT NIGH

  The journey so far had left us all shattered, and boarding the 22-hour flight home with a savage hangover, gained by trying to spend the last of the free bar tab we had been given by the hostel, didn't do much to make things better.

  It was strange to step from the sun-kissed sand of Bondi Beach into the damp sub-zero conditions of Manchester, England, but I was grinning my head off as I apprecia
ted all the little things I had been missing for the past ten months.

  Hannah was now safely on another container ship and sailing her way slowly across the Pacific Ocean from Sydney to San Francisco. The plan was that we would pick her up when she arrived there in a month or so and then drive across the USA from coast to coast.

  From New York we would then air-freight Hannah over to Israel before finally steering her back up to London, having driven all of the way around the world.

  Christmas flew by in a haze of family gatherings, lie-ins until lunchtime and turkey sandwiches. All of our family members asked one of the same two questions when we told them about our cross-USA extension.

  'Are you sure this GetTaxi company is legitimate? What if they're trying to get you to carry drugs for them?' asked the mums, aunties and grannies.

  'When are you going to get a real job?' the dads and uncles half-jokingly enquired, the concern barely masked in their voices.

  By the middle of January we were itching to get back to our day job and start the process of driving Hannah another 13,000 miles.

  'This bag is three times the maximum weight allowed per individual item, I can't let it go.'

  Bright mid-morning sun shone through the glass roof at Heathrow airport and the three of us were reeling to find ourselves where we were. Who would have thought exactly one year since we were arguing about taxi parts in the bowels of Aston University's engineering department, we would be arguing about them again in Heathrow Airport.

  It was time to implement our well-honed blagging skills – if we could do the Chinese driving test then sweet-talking a check-in girl at Heathrow should be child's play.

  Leigh began telling our story, smiling sweetly and doing the male equivalent of fluttering his eyelashes. The girl behind the desk was playing ball.

  'I'm not sure there's much we can do… wait, so you're transporting charity medical equipment?'

  'Um, no, it's brake parts and a steering arm for a nineteen-ninety-two London taxi, I've just told you…'

  'OK, so, charity m-e-d-i-c-a…' she started to type it into the machine, giving us a sly wink.

  'Ooooh, yeah. Medical stuff… for kids mainly… saving lives and all that.'

  'Well now, actually there will be no charge, we don't charge for excess baggage if it's medical equipment,' she beamed back at us before wishing us well.

  We hitched the bag on to the conveyor belt, passed through security and headed to the pub.

  We had stayed in some pretty atrocious conditions over the past year – Russian crack dens, grass verges in industrial parks, Iranian artillery fields – but a flight from Heathrow to Baltimore could give them a run for their money. The cabin was cold, the coffee was cold, and the food and drinks (which you had to pay for) were rudely distributed with as much finesse as a workhouse chef. However, after one more flight we were in San Francisco, munching away on real American pizza.

  Hannah was delayed on the ship, so we busied ourselves by preparing for our trip across the States, buying SIM cards and tracking down a workshop to do the mammoth amount of work needed on the car.

  There are worse places in the world to be stuck. San Francisco's hilly streets, changeable weather and charming people meant that when we weren't carrying out taxi-related paperwork, we were very content visiting Alcatraz, wandering around Fisherman's Wharf and even sampling the city's excellent local brew, Anchor Steam, while watching the Super Bowl in a real sports bar.

  Days passed as we waited for the news from our shipping agent that we'd be able to collect Hannah. We eventually got the call and were informed that the car had been selected for special investigation by customs and that we had to pay for the truck to ship the container to the customs yard. We ended up having to pay fees for the search and for the cost of them storing the car in their yard and the fines for whatever random things they could find wrong with the car. Shipping Hannah from Australia to America cost four times the original value of the cab – a vehicle that was ready for the scrapyard and wouldn't pass any of the MOT tests.

  'But I'm a ten-hour drive away,' he pleaded down the phone. 'OK, I'm leaving now. DO NOT sell it. I'm driving all the way from San Francisco for it!'

  Jon closed his 1990s flip-phone. 'Um… does anyone want to go to LA?'

  Jon was an American student we had met at the Sufi festival in Lahore, Pakistan, who had come to meet us in San Francisco. He'd begged to join us across America when he heard we were extending our trip, and I had jokingly replied that we had no space and we only travel with other taxis, but if he could get his hands on a New York yellow cab then he would be welcome to come along. A few weeks later, here he was, following up on an ad for a yellow cab he'd seen on Craigslist. Even though Jon had transferred the deposit to the seller, he'd just heard that they were going to sell it to someone else unless he picked it up that day.

  Leigh was lying on his bed, watching action films on his laptop, headphones in and Johno was absorbed in a book.

  'Err, sure,' I responded – this sounded like it had the potential to be a random adventure within an adventure.

  'Leigh, we're going to LA to buy a New York taxi from some gangsters, back sometime tomorrow.'

  He looked up from Zombie Brain Robots 7.

  'Cool.'

  Jon and I picked up his car in the Oakland area of San Francisco (somewhere I made a mental note never to return to, filled as it was with unsavoury characters). It was a mid-1990s Jeep Cherokee, and it was filled to bursting with crap.

  'Bloody hell, it looks like you've been living in here!' I said.

  'I, err, kind of have been… for a bit,' he replied sheepishly.

  'But, mate, it looks like you've been living in here for a year.'

  Old food wrappers and tools carpeted the floor, along with vast quantities of cigar ash, and the entire back of the car was filled with bags and luggage.

  'Yeah, best part of a year actually.'

  It turns out there was a lot about Jon we didn't know.

  The next thing I found out was that he is incredibly tight. We stopped at an In-N-Out Burger chain, which Jon had raved about, but as I tucked into the most delicious burger and fries I'd ever tasted I looked across and saw Jon was just sipping on a Coke.

  'Don't you want any?'

  'Yeah, but I'm trying to save money.'

  Jon was so tight he made Johno (the tightest Northerner in the entire world) look like Jenna Jameson. He only had a limited amount of cash to last him across the States, so that meant In-NOuts and beers were out of the question.

  I could feel his pain; we had made it from England to Australia on a budget where the cost of that one roadside In-N-Out would last for three days. We would camp, skip lunch, Couchsurf and take advantage of every free meal we were ever given. Yes, we went out and partied quite a lot during the trip, but those nights would happen every few weeks, and often included free or ridiculously cheap booze.

  But in the USA, with the new sponsor on board and a healthy living allowance, money wasn't as much of a problem anymore.

  We headed south-east through rolling landscapes, topped by wind turbines. The sun was setting behind us, bathing the I5 Freeway in a rich orange glow. Big '76' petrol towers advertised fuel stops, roadside diners advertised burgers and chain motels advertised cheap rooms. This was the real America.

  Time was ticking, and Jon kept calling the seller to ensure he hadn't sold the car and to update him on our progress. It all sounded very unreliable if you asked me. I took over driving and got my first feel for the American roads. It took no time at all for it to become clear that Americans are atrocious drivers. It's a bold statement to make – I'm not the best driver in the world by any stretch of the imagination – but having driven most of the way around the world by this point, I could comment with some authority on the topic and make sweeping generalisations about national driving ability.

  Apparently, there are no lane rules – one can weave in and out of lanes, depending on which moves fastest
at the time. Lorries are vast and are allowed to drive at whatever speed they want and big 4x4 pickup trucks seemed to have the right to mow down all other road users with impunity.

  The cab-seller called threatening to sell again. We told him we would be there around 2 a.m. and hoped that was cool. I envisioned an elderly taxi driver being kept up late waiting for us to arrive.

  'Err… I don't think that's the case. This guy sounds like a gangster; he's Armenian and he lives in Pasadena.' Wherever that was.

  'So this guy's possibly a gangster, and we're turning up at 2 a.m. with two grand in cash?'

  There was silence for the next few minutes as we contemplated our situation. The chances of us getting beaten up by angry mobsters looked high. Just before we got to our destination I pulled over, opened the toolbox and took out the tyre iron to place by my feet, at the ready.