By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (43 page)

We spent an easy day cruising down to Alice, the stark, rocky outback shimmering into the distance. We were just chilling - good music on the radio, Mungo mooning the oncoming traffic, the normal kind of thing boys get up to on a road trip. Late in the afternoon with the tank half empty I rolled past a petrol station thinking we’d have plenty to get us to the next one. But an hour or so later the gauge was on red and then the light came on. The next town was still seventy kilometres ahead and the last thing we needed was to run out. If you do that in a diesel you get air-locks in the injectors and it’s a bastard to try and bleed them.

Spotting a picnic area with a couple of campers parked up, I pulled in and wound down my window. There were some people sitting at a table and I called out to them, asking if they had any spare diesel. They shook their heads. My heart sank. To have come all this way just to run out of fuel in the Australian outback; how typical is that? Just then another van pulled in driven by an elderly guy, his wife sitting alongside him with their dog. Walking over, I asked them if they had any diesel, explaining that we were about to run out.

‘That’ll be a bugger,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a jerrican in the back, you can have that.’

I couldn’t have been more relieved - he’d really saved our bacon. I emptied the ten-litre jerrican into the tank while we introduced ourselves. His name was Kevin Mitchell.

‘Thanks, Kevin,’ I said as we paid him. ‘Have a drink on us.’ He looked at the money and gave me a wry smile. ‘I’ll pick up a slab.’

Twenty-four cans of beer straight from the cold room; come Friday you see plenty of guys with a slab or two slung over each shoulder.

‘Do that,’ I said. ‘And thanks again.’

We finally made it to Alice Springs and the next morning hooked up with Dave ‘The Outback Man’, his brother Ken and their mate Gary. Dave - a stocky guy with a thick, grey beard and Akubra hat - had been dubbed ‘The Outback Man’ by Australian TV and was pretty well known in the area. Along with Ken and Gary, he would be guiding us to the South Australia border in utes and had brought along some food and swag bags so we could have at least one night under the stars. They won’t mind me saying that they were all knocking on a bit - Dave said they had four hundred and fifty years of outback experience between them. He was great company, full of jokes and quips, and between him and his brother they had us in stitches.

We were making for Uluru, known to many as Ayers Rock, but before we left town Dave took us to meet Noel Fullerton. Originally we had hoped to make Alice in time for the annual camel race, but because of the long haul from Timor to Darwin, we’d just missed it. Noel had been organising the race for almost forty years. At seventy-four with a white beard and long white hair, he made the Outback Man look like a city slicker. Wearing a pair of battered jeans and a leather waistcoat with a bandanna tied round his head, he explained that he had been working with camels almost all his life, taking people on safaris into the desert where some half a million camels roam wild.

‘I always tell ’em,’ he said, ‘riding a camel, you’ve got a one in ten chance of breaking a leg. So bear that in mind.’

He told me that when he first came to Alice it had a population of just five thousand. This really was the heart of the old country - even in 1926 there had been just twenty-eight white men and eight white women. The first camel race was run in 1970 and started out as a bet between Noel and his mate Keith Mooney-Smith, who raced a pair of camels along the dried Todd River bed. Now the Camel Cup is an annual event and Noel still supplies a lot of the mounts. It takes place at the Lions Club track in the middle of a dusty park, which is where I met him.

Noel introduced me to ‘Number 26’ - a tall, grey, regal-looking camel who had raced the day before. He kneeled down so I could climb into the saddle. Noel suggested I walk him round the track a few times while he saddled another. And then he casually mentioned that he had entered me in a belated two-man race against one of the locals.

Russ, who was looking on from the fence, asked if I needed a crash helmet.

‘Only if he comes off,’ Noel told him.

Sitting there on a kneeling camel with a lap of the track ahead of me, I felt like a 500 GP racer from the seventies - back in the days when you had to bump-start your machine and jump on. The guy I was racing was experienced and he had that ‘I’m going to kick your Pommie arse’ look in his eye.

Noel cracked his whip like a starting pistol and we were off. I stood in the stirrups, with my opponent heading for the first bend. Meanwhile Number 26 wheeled sharply to the right and dived for a gap in the fence, his massive tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. I tried to haul him round, but he was having none of it. The gap was too small, but that wasn’t going to stop him trying. We came clattering into the fence and I only just got my right leg out of the way before it was crushed. He still managed to crunch my left leg, though, bruising my shin and tearing a slice of leather from the toe of my brand-new R. M. Williams Outback boots.

Undeterred I went back to the start and the bugger tried to do the same thing again. But I was ready for him this time, and with a tighter rein I brought him round and took off after the guy who was going to kick my arse: which he did. We raced once more and still he beat me, but for a greenhorn Noel said I’d done all right. The others had gone ahead in the trucks and with Noel’s permission I rode the camel out to meet them.

En route to Ayers Rock we stopped for something to eat at the Stuart’s Well Roadhouse; where Dinky the Dingo plays piano. He’s world-famous apparently, having played duets with all sorts of well-known people.

‘Don’t touch him and don’t make eye contact,’ his owner James Cotterill told me. ‘He can be a bit of a boy and after all, he’s not a dog.’

A little nervously I sat down on the piano stool in a cafe full of people. I played with two fingers while Dinky, who looked like a cross between a tawny Alsatian and a Eurasian wolf, climbed onto the keys and proceeded to howl.

After I was done Russ sat at the piano and Ken looked over with an ‘Oh no, not again’ sort of look on his face. ‘Can he actually play?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he can.’

They played a pretty good duet, Russ blasting out some rock ’n’ roll while Dinky paced the keys and yowled as if he’d been shot.

Back in the truck we left town on a single-lane highway, a few sparse trees the only landmarks in an otherwise empty landscape. An hour or so later the rock just lifted from the desert - a magnificent great flat-topped hill that dominated the surrounding area.

‘No, mate,’ Dave said, before I could speak. ‘That’s Mount Conner. Everyone makes the same mistake; no worries.’

Shortly after, the road curved to the right and there was the rock, smoother and rounder than Mount Conner and a bright, vivid red. Made of coarse-grain sandstone, arkose, it sounds almost hollow when you tap it - the last remaining piece of a once vast mountain range that has gradually been eroded away. Dave told me that only about a fifth is above ground - the rest is under the sand. The aboriginal people call it Uluru and for countless years they’ve been coming here because it’s a place of life when the rest of the desert is parched. The desert was parched now: the region we were heading into hadn’t seen rain in four years and even when it does rain it’s still just about the driest region in one of the driest places on earth.

There was nothing Dave didn’t know about Uluru, the desert, the wildlife. The outback had been his backyard all his life and he loved it. Leaving the main road for dirt we were very quickly into deep red dust that hugged the wheels and kicked up great clouds behind us. Dave said we were on the largest cattle ranch in the world, and when there was water in the ground some twenty-thousand head wandered this area alone.

It was the perfect place to camp. Dave suggested a couple of trees in a dip about fifty yards off the road and I bumped across the scrub with no problem. Russ got stuck. He always gets stuck - I’m beginning to think he does it on purpose. He rolled a truck on Long Way Round, when we did the Dakar he got stuck in the sand and he got stuck again on Long Way Down. We were thinking about a fire and he was still calf-deep in red dust with the wheels spinning.

‘You’ve got to lock the front hubs,’ I yelled.

‘What?’

‘The front hubs, you’ve got to lock them.’ Heading over, I made the adjustment and he was able to drive out.

Dave got a fire going with plenty of air underneath, while I dug a pit so that when it was burning properly we could move it. I watched the sun go down over the desert - a vast emptiness with straggly trees and boulders and acres of red dust. Before I rode a bike round the world I hated camping. Now I can’t get enough of it and I counted myself very lucky to be spending the night sleeping under the Southern Cross in the Australian outback.

While I dug the hole Ken was standing over me, sipping from a water bottle half-filled with Johnnie Walker.

‘Looks like a urine sample,’ his brother told him.

‘Whisky, mate. Don’t worry, Charley, there’s plenty of beer and a cheeky little red for you blokes.’

The next thing I knew he was blasting the Australian National Anthem from the cab of his truck.

They cooked a fantastic dinner of steak and fried potatoes and they really did have a few bottles of the cheeky red in the back of the truck. After dinner we shot the breeze, telling jokes and laughing. When it got late I picked up my swag bag and headed for the patch of ground in front of my truck that I’d painstakingly cleared and graded. Swag bags are all-in-one waterproof sleeping bags, with pillow, mattress and duvet built in. Crawling into mine, I was reminded that Australia is the most toxic country in the world, with something like seven of the world’s ten most venomous snakes. Luckily, just as I settled in, Mungo broke wind as only Mungo can, and I knew then that the smell would keep them at bay.

 

On Monday morning I woke to sausages, bacon, tomatoes and fried eggs - these outback boys really know how to live. Fully fed we were on the dirt again and I was driving, the road pretty gnarly, hoping to catch a road train. Road trains are monstrous bull-nosed trucks that haul three massive trailers, creating a single vehicle with more than forty wheels. We were pretty sure we could find one that would take us as far as the South Australian border.

Suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere, we came across a John Deere 670D, a huge vehicle used to flatten the washboard corrugations cars cause on dirt roads. The back end was all engine, while the cab sat in the middle. The front was a long proboscis with a huge blade underneath. Standing beside one of the massive wheels was an old boy in a baseball cap and a pair of those really short shorts that Aussies like to wear. He had a bushy grey beard and a skinny little pipe clamped between his teeth.

‘That’s Popeye,’ Dave said. ‘Let’s say hello.’

Popeye was pleased to see us; out on the road he didn’t get many visitors.

I introduced myself, and asked him about his truck.

He grinned. ‘It’s a big toy to play with, that’s for sure.’ He said he had been grading the road with this particular company for ten years.

‘And you’re out here by yourself?’

‘Yep. I see the odd person now and again. Cars go by, blokes like you. Every once in a while I have to nurse a cyclist back to health, someone who has no idea how big this country is and isn’t carrying enough water. But yeah, I’m by myself. No other bloke wants to come out here.’

I took a moment to gaze at the nothingness all around us. ‘But where do you live? How do you get home?’

‘I’ve got my house and that with me,’ he said. ‘I’m a gypsy. I live on the side of the road.’

He told me he had a daughter in Alice Springs and went back now and again to get supplies, but he was sixty-three years old and there was no way he could get a job in town. No one wanted to be stuck out here on their own, but the road still had to be graded. He did a few weeks at a time then went back for a day or so, but it wasn’t uncommon for him to be here for fourteen weeks or more. He carried 14,000 litres of diesel and now and then a tanker would come out to replenish his stock. He maintained the grader himself, fixing punctures and doing whatever else was needed. He even let me have a go at grading a piece of Australian dirt road myself.

He was a great guy to talk to and so chirpy; the pipe stuck in his mouth clearly a fixture. No wonder they called him Popeye. I asked him if Olive Oyl was at home, but he shook his head.

‘Nope, not any more.’

Bidding goodbye to Popeye we headed for the road train in Coober Pedy; a tiny dot in a vast, rocky desert where they mine opal. Dave said there were at least a million shafts out in the field, some of them twenty metres deep. There was a sign suggesting that you didn’t run, or walk backwards in that area.

‘Photographers,’ Dave explained. ‘You’d be amazed how many people have been taking piccies and stepped backwards into a hole.’ He shook his head. ‘Twenty-metre hard rock-fall, that’s not good. Best to stay on the road here; don’t go out in the field.’

It was the road train, however, that dominated my thoughts: ever since we talked about crossing Australia I’d wanted to drive one. You don’t find them anywhere else in the world; they have big rigs in the States but nothing like these. The ones we’d seen had those massive American bull-nosed tractor units, rather than the flat-fronted ones we’re used to in Europe. There is something about the old Mack trucks, the Kenworths, that just reeks of raw power. Over here it was so much more accentuated, because when you’re pulling three massive trailers, the word ‘train’ is the only way you could begin to describe them. When we’d overtaken one or been overtaken by one, they thundered across the ground as if they were alive. The clatter of the diesel, the coughing exhaust, the air horn . . . they were a real icon of the outback.