We were very glad to see Rusty indeed.
All we had to do now was drive back down one of those delightfully corrugated roads – for about an hour – and then we could start looking for a place to spend the night.
It was Gill’s turn to drive.
She insisted, saying that it was only fair she do her share, and that the bleeding had mostly stopped anyway.
“Be extra careful,” Roo warned her, “there’ll be kangaroos about. They mostly come out at dawn and dusk, and this place will be full of them.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be going fast enough to kill anything!” Gill replied.
And she didn’t. But that didn’t stop the kangaroos from trying.
“They must have a death wish,” I commented, as we crawled past dozens of the critters, lining both sides of the road as though they were expecting a parade to come down it.
“The plants they eat grow better along the edges of the road, because of the moisture and carbon dioxide from car exhausts,” Roo explained.
“That doesn’t explain why they keep leaping out in front of us!”
Gill swerved to avoid another apparently suicidal kangaroo.
“Sometimes they use roads,” Roo continued, “because it’s easier than going through the bush. But they’re jumping at us because they’re scared. You’ve got to remember, kangaroos evolved without any natural predators, so they don’t have a fight-or-flight instinct like most animals. So when something scares them – like the noise of a car passing – their brain short-circuits, and they jump randomly. Quite often, straight into the car that spooked them.”
“So what you’re telling us is that kangaroos are mind-boggling stupid?”
“Yep. They have the tiniest brains, like walnuts. And they have two penises.”
“What? That’s… also very stupid.”
Suddenly Gill swerved, and there was a loud thump on the front wing.
“SHIT!” she bawled.
All eyes swung to that corner, where a smallish grey shape was bounding off into the darkness.
“He bounced right into me,” Gill said. “No warning! I was already past him when he jumped.”
“Looks like he was okay though,” Roo said.
“Yeah, he picked himself up and bounced right on. But I hope Rusty’s okay!”
It was a tense drive after that, as we all sat in silence, scanning the road in front and to either side. Gill crawled Rusty forwards at a snail’s pace, and finally the headlights picked out the junction with the tarmac road.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Let’s not do this again, okay?”
Both girls turned to glare at me, at which point I remembered why we were out driving so late. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that folks…”
Night had fallen long before we located a campsite entrance.
As Gill pulled up in a car park across from the office, Roo slid off her seat in the back, and lay down in the footwell.
“Are you okay?” Gill asked.
“Yeah,” came the stage-whispered response, “I’m hiding! It’s dark, so they’ll never notice. Go in and pay for the site, and if they ask if it’s just the two of you, say yes.”
Gill gave me a nervous glance, then reached back and pulled a towel over Roo’s head. “In case someone looks in,” she explained.
It seemed to take the receptionist forever to arrange a pitch for us. I was starting to get paranoid, picturing us walking out of the office to find the van surrounded by site wardens or police.
How embarrassing would it be, to be busted for this? Roo squatting on the floor of the van, covered in towels, just to avoid paying an extra twelve dollars for camping. But even my basic maths skills could calculate how quickly money was running out. Sneaky, underhanded tactics like this were all that stood between me and bankruptcy – which in any case was inevitable in less than a fortnight.
The woman behind the desk clucked her tongue as Gill handed back the form she’d been filling out. One night. Two persons.
“Did it work?” Roo whispered, when we climbed back into Rusty.
“Shhh! Yes and no.”
“What?”
“Yes, they just charged us the price for a Wicked van.”
“Did you tell her this is not a Wicked van?”
“No, I was too worried about her asking if we knew there was a Roo hiding under our towels!”
“Bloody Wicked vans,” she grumbled.
“But the bad news is, you’ve got to stay down! The woman from the office is coming out to show us to our pitch.”
“Oh… shit!”
“I know!”
There followed a tense few minutes, as Gill guided Rusty along at walking pace, following the woman who was pointing out the way with a torch.
Finally we stopped. Gill jumped out to talk to her, and came back a few minutes later with the news that the woman was leaving. “But stay down for a bit,” she advised Roo. “She might come back, if she’s forgotten to tell us something.”
So Gill and I put the tent up that night, and when it was ready Roo scurried inside, still wearing a towel over her head.
“That’s not going to help much,” I pointed out, when she was safely inside.
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”
“But was it worth it?” Gill asked.
Roo thought about that for a few seconds. “It was,” she decided.
And by the end of the trip, taking it in turns to hide under a pile of towels during check-ins, between us we saved over $300.
So yeah, she was right. It was worth it.
We stayed up late that night in the luxurious camp kitchen, laughing about the crazy day we’d had, and about the craziness of Australia in general.
Like most former British colonies, Australia is littered with place names ‘inspired’ by the UK. Gill had been amused to find ‘York’ on the map, as she’d been born there (in England, obviously). This York, a farming town only an hour’s drive from Perth, had a population of less than 4,000 – not quite a match for the magnificent medieval city it was named after, but then I’d rather live an hour’s drive from Perth, Australia, than Perth, Scotland. Only because of the weather, I assure you.
But now we were camping in…
“Exmouth? Come on! There isn’t even a River Exe here to need a mouth!”
There wasn’t a river at all, which offended my sensibilities a little. “If we’re going to ignore naming conventions wholesale, I might as well pick a random patch of desert and call it The Isle Of Wight!”
This silliness put me in the mood to do some writing. I’d been spending most evenings squinting at the screen of my miniature Sony Vaio, trying to add a few chapters to the book I was working on. Often I’d sit up quite late after the girls had gone to bed, nursing a last glass of wine and reading through my notes.
It was still too early to make claims of greatness, but I was pretty happy with the way it was turning out. The memories of my time in Ecuador, volunteering in an exotic animal refuge, would eventually be lost if I didn’t record them – but I had high hopes of finding a publisher for this little memoir.
After all, it had a cracking title.
So I picked up the bag with my laptop in, to move it from table to chair – and as I did so, it slipped from my fingers, falling the remaining distance to the concrete floor.
It struck with a sickening thud. At the same time as I heard the impact, I felt it somewhere in my stomach. A lurch, and a sudden queasiness. A dread.
I pulled the laptop from the bag, swearing frantically, and pressed the power button.
The tiny machine clicked and whirred for a few seconds, the battery light blinked – and ‘OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND’ appeared on the display.
And that, for now, was the end of ‘That Bear Ate My Pants!’.
I went to bed early that night.
Rest and Repair
Exmouth was a tiny place compared to its English compatriot; in fact there was so little there that driving t
hrough town in Rusty caused quite a stir. The sea-front road – also the only road – was lined with onlookers as we cruised down it in search of a campsite. People smiled and waved – some even held up their phones to take photos of us. Perhaps they thought the circus had come to town. It was always weird when we met this kind of reaction, as we’d become so used to Rusty that we only paid attention to him when smoke was coming out of him.
Gill or Roo would be first to notice, as I’m fairly oblivious to the world around me. “Those people are staring at us,” one of them would comment. “So are the guys over there! Wait – that woman and her daughter are waving at us… do we know them?”
This would be followed almost immediately by the realisation; “Oh, we’re in Rusty! That’s why everyone’s looking!”
So we’d smile and wave back, feeling rather like we were making an official visit.
It was like the best parts of being a celebrity, without the crowds of paparazzi hassling us when we got out. And without the millions of dollars and the rock-star lifestyle, but we were working on that.
Starting with saving my book.
Amazingly, for a ‘town’ the size of Exmouth (population 1,998!), there was a laptop repair specialist listed in the phone directory. He worked from home, so we paid him a visit in Rusty. I left the computer with him, and spent the next couple of days feeling sorry for myself. We’d planned on being much further up the coast in Broome by now, but there was nothing else we could do; so we waited. The girls weren’t gutted, to be honest; they needed a break from the tedious days of driving, and by pure chance they discovered a late-night trampolining emporium right outside our campsite. What are the odds? Exmouth didn’t even have a public swimming pool. As we were the only customers, we got chatting to the owners, and I had to admire their vision. Some things are worth sticking your neck out for; late-night trampolining and homemade ice cream – despite being a fairly volatile combination – was one of them.
So we stayed for a week.
And Roo continued to hide under a pile of towels every time we drove past the site office, which averaged around six times a day.
Every single time we pulled up outside our tent, guaranteed someone nearby would say, “Oh look, that Wicked van is back!”
It set our collective teeth on edge.
But what is a Wicked van, you ask?
Wicked Vans, or ‘Wicked Campers’, to give them their slightly misleading title, had been a constant thorn in our side. They weren’t campers – they were regular vans, like Rusty only in an even shittier state of repair. Their back seats had been ripped out, and a bed made from a sheet of plywood. Then they were spray-painted all over with rebellious graphics and slogans, and hired out at obscene prices to backpackers who had no other way of exploring. Their main selling point, aside from their graffitied bad-assery, was that you were allowed to crash them. Seriously – there was no charge for ‘minor damage’, which might give you a clue as to the general condition of the vans on offer. At one point the entire Sydney Wicked fleet was suspended from driving, pending a state-wide series of road-worthiness tests.
So understandably, Rusty being mistaken for a Wicked van bothered us.
Rusty’s colourful paint job was what we’d come to call ‘Granny-friendly’. Utterly inoffensive. We loved it when whole families would smile and wave as we went past.
Wicked vans had a similar effect – well, the ones that didn’t have naked tits or crude sex scenes daubed all over them. On approach, the first thing you’d spot is some indecipherable nonsense scrawled across the front. Next, the big cartoon on the side would slide past, featuring the boys from Southpark, or maybe flaming devils, or cats chasing a ball of wool. Kids would shriek in delight, and adults would turn to look, just as the back of the van slid into view – emblazoned with an appropriately witty counterpoint, like: “Every time you masturbate, a kitten dies!”
Cue much awkwardness.
There was usually a big space around Wicked vans in car parks, for this reason – and presumably so that any bricks thrown at the van wouldn’t bounce off and hit more respectable vehicles.
Amongst the slogans we spotted on our travels were some vaguely amusing ones, like ‘If Quizzes Are Quizzical, Then What Are Tests?’ – some slightly controversial ones, like ‘Save a Whale – Harpoon a Jap!’ – and some that seemed likely to get their drivers lynched – like ‘It’s better to be black than gay, coz U don’t have to tell your parents.’
Argh.
So whenever people made the assumption that Rusty was a Wicked van, we were quick to correct them. In Exmouth, Gill came up with a better way of making our point. It was July, so she tore the first couple of months off a calendar we’d picked up in one of Geraldton’s two-dollar stores. She taped them together, and made a sign for Rusty’s back windscreen.
“We’d Rather Push Rusty Than Hire A Wicked Van!” it read.
“That’ll tell ‘em,” she said.
Finally, I got a call from Mr Fixit. I walked into his house with a long face, and walked out with the empty shell of my laptop and a plastic carrier bag full of its guts. The prognosis: terminal.
(Bit of computer-based humour there, to lighten the mood!)
On the upside I also had a CD-ROM, which – so he told me – contained all the data he’d been able recover from the shattered hard drive.
Now I had the world’s most agonising wait to find out how much, if any, of my book had been saved; the first place we’d be able to check would be Broome.
So we buggered off Broome-wards at top speed.
Road Trip
Broome, from Exmouth, is quite a drive.
It’s a little over a thousand miles away – not the kind of place you nip over to because they’ve got cheese on special offer.
It was going to be an epic journey, spanning several days, so we had a last bounce at the trampoline place to prepare ourselves.
What? That totally helps.
We were heading straight towards the Northern Territory, but the landscape was nothing like the swamps and jungles from Crocodile Dundee.
Something seemed to be missing here. It was… everything! The plants. The animals. The bush! All I could see, for miles and miles in every direction, was flat, red dust, with patches of low, scrubby grasses dotted here and there. It was about as desolate as you could imagine… and it went on forever. This was the real Australia – the hundreds of thousands of square miles of empty, red desert. From here, on the eastern-most edge of Western Australia, it stretched most of the way across the country, a vast swathe of barren no-man’s land known as The Red Centre.
The wildness of this landscape was at once its rugged beauty and its deadly teeth; there was no help out here for anyone in need of it, no easy way to return to civilization – just the long, straight road you drove in on, and the possibility of the occasional car heading back your way. If you went off-road, there wasn’t even that. No tracks, no landmarks – no water. To go out there you had to know exactly what you were doing. If you didn’t, chances were you wouldn’t be coming back.
On those long, lonely stretches of road, other vehicles of any description were a welcome break from the monotony. The first clue would be a tiny cloud of dust on the horizon; then, undoubtedly, one of us would cry “Look! A car’s coming!” with the same trill of excitement normally reserved for pointing out a roadside burger bar.
The conversation would pick up as the other vehicle approached; “I wonder if it’s a farmer?”
“Who else would be out this far?”
“Hope it’s not a road train…”
By this point the car had grown from a speck to an identifiable shape, with predictable results;
“I told you it’d be a farmer!”
“Well, who else would be out this far?”
“Thank God it’s not a road train….”
And then the vehicle – which was always a substantial four-wheel drive, like a Land Cruiser, and was always covered in a thick layer
of dirt and dead insects – would hurtle past, rattling the van and showering us in freshly churned-up dust.
We’d feel an instant kinship with the occupants, as they became visible through the windscreen; more often than not a single, weather-beaten Aussie battler, bush-hardened and confident, driving with his window down and his Akubra (cowboy hat) on.
Inevitably our eyes would meet, and some signal of recognition would be exchanged between the two drivers, each according the other a measure of respect just for being here.
Sometimes a single grubby finger would lift from the steering wheel to acknowledge our passing; sometimes we’d receive a cheerful thumbs-up, or a mock salute – or, on the few occasions when the car was fully occupied, enthusiastic double-handed waving from everyone inside. There were as many different road-greetings as there were vehicles on the road.
In other words, about ten.
And then, as the car receded into the distance, the chatter would resurface;
“He didn’t look like a farmer.”
“Well, why else would he be out here?”
And speculation would keep us occupied for the next ten or fifteen kilometres.
Unless it was a road train.
Gigantic trucks pulling four, or even five, extra-long, extra-wide semi-trailers; seeing one of those monstrosities bearing down on you is like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. No, scratch that – I’ve only ever done that twice, and both times I had no idea what was going on, so I can’t really claim to understand it. Let’s say it’s like… preparing to catch a small crocodile bare-handed. You know that you’re about to put yourself in the worst kind of harm’s way – but you have absolutely no choice. All you can do is tighten the muscles around your bladder – because you can’t know if you’re going to pee yourself until you’ve tried it – then grab.
Or in this case, grit your teeth, brace yourself against as many fixed surfaces as possible, and start reciting the Our Father.
Road trains don’t just bring dust; they often brought substantial pieces of road with them, torn from the sealed surface by the violence of their passing. The slip-stream they produce is gale-force, buffeting the car and pushing it off the road, then dragging it back on in the monster’s wake. Some careful steering is required, combined with a grip like iron on the wheel, nerves of steel all round – and a pair of those adult incontinence knickers wouldn’t go amiss. Road trains really are the kings of the road, and the general rule of thumb which applies in these encounters is this: get out of the fucking way!
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 6