Miles from Anywhere

The Red Center

The next 1000km stretch was a bit on the dry side; I averaged around 140 but still felt as if we were standing still as the barren nothingness stretched to infinite in all directions. Ashley, the driving nazi, carefully planned our gas stops, so we could fill up and get out whilst preserving every precious moment of daylight. Roadhouses appeared every few hundred km but offered little in the way of attractions; the only truly memorable sight along the route was a truck carrying a giant yellow marshmallow-man which quite literally ran us off the road. Music was hard to come by – some towns hosted tiny stations that could be heard for a few hundred meters of highway, but we mostly had to rely on our group's pitiful selection of CDs including (and entirely limited to) the sleep-inducing droning of Tori Amos, a dance mix and a two Australian pop bands – leave it to a bunch of girls not to pack a single heavy metal album.

Shortly after sunset we made it to Devil's Marbles which are piles of very big, very round rocks. I pressed the group to climb to the top of the stack and set up camp, but our martinet leader made us push onward into the night. With no particular inclination to a death in an explosion of animal flesh, I crawled along at 90 and nearly came to a halt on the rare occasion that oncoming traffic left me “brightless." We came across two roos that could easily have decimated our car had they been the suicidal type, as well as a bull that would likely have folded our hood like an accordion without so much as blinking.

In the tiny settlement of Ti Tree, we found a campground which promised a swimming pool and emus – neither of these offered much appeal on a cold winter night, but we did make our first successful attempt at cooking (after a few harrowing trials of figuring out which side of the gas knob was “on") and had a gourmet meal of noodles and non-descript red sauce. Two of us set up our bags under the stars while the others grabbed the bed of the car; around 11 we noticed that the stars had mysteriously disappeared and the first “weather" of the trip was soon upon us. We quickly crammed into the car along with a dozen bags, much to the annoyance of those who were sleeping peacefully within.

Come the morrow, we got our daily battery jump and set out towards Alice. We stopped there for all of 5 minutes to ask about road conditions and grab some more food (at what is perhaps the only real grocery in 2500km). A desert race was commencing which would head south through hundreds of kilometres of wilderness; we opted not to enter our station wagon as desert racing was explicitly forbid in our contract. We were told that the only road our car could handle was the fully sealed highway that went 120km further than the other 2 options (it's quite possible the tourist info centre is in cahoots with the gas stations that charged us $1.40 a liter).

A few hours later, we were in Kings Canyon. We did a 2-hour rim walk which had us scrambling over hundreds of tiered rock domes and edging along precipitous cliffs. We had to drive back along the hilly, windy road at night and came across 2 dingoes, 7 kangaroos, and 1 camel – no matter what you're told about the Australian outback, there's really nothing that can prepare you for seeing a 4m-tall wild camel walking down the middle of the road; while other critters flee from headlights, this guy just nonchalantly walked beside our car, fully confident that he could crush us without the slightest effort – as usual, no one volunteered to jump on its back for a picture.

It was some time around here that we realized that we had somehow miscalculated our schedule – we were actually a day ahead of where we were supposed to be and the psychotic pace of the last few days was largely for nought. So we opted to give up the plan of breaking into the park and doing a moonlight climb of the rock and find a place to sleep instead.

We camped in a free “outback campground"; the other three grabbed the car bed while I set up a (soon deflated) air mattress on the rock soil outside. The temps were at most just above freezing with a strong windchill (a slight change from the 30 degrees we'd seen on our hike a few hours earlier).

The group spontaneously decided to sleep through sunrise and stay sealed in the warm car for a good bit after that. When they finally arose (around the time I started piling food and luggage into their bed), we got yet another jump and made our way to the Olgas. Here we did a Valley of the Winds walk through the massive rounded boulders.

We drove to the Ayers Rock cultural center to learn about all the sacred beliefs we were about to violate; this was completely the driver's doing as the rest of us could care less and were somewhat eager to climb the infamous towering stone that loomed a few kilometres away. The centre did have an interesting, highly graphic instructional video on how to clean and cook a kangaroo – the monologue went along the lines of “Time to take out the guts; man, these are big guts!" I found this all immensely funny though I have it on good authority that it's actually not.

Pulling our leader away from a guide to sucking honey from an ant's butt, we walked 2km to the rock face (our car wouldn't start) and commenced the climb. It really amazes me that only 20 people have died on this route over the years, as it basically entails crawling straight up a 45-60 degree incline using only an ankle-high chain. As we painstakingly pulled ourselves up, hand-over-hand, seventy-year-old men jogged down past us deriding us as they passed. Eventually the chain ended and we were made to fall down and claw up a series of dips until we reached the official top. From here, the entire countryside with Olgas and surrounding ranges unfolded before us. Then all that remained was to get back down without cracking our heads open.

The rest of the group was a bit winded, so they went back to the car while I ran the 10km basewalk. The walls were punctuated by elaborate honeycombs and gaping caves and I snapped picture after picture as I careened around the rock at lightning speed.

When I got back to the car at half an hour to sunset, the group had just gotten a jump from the last couple to leave the lot and we were off to the sunset viewing area. This was lined with hundreds of cars as everyone made his/her best attempt at time-lapse photography as the sun sank below the horizon and cast an ever-changing tinge on the massive boulder.

Somehow our car restarted on its own and we returned to the free camping lot of the previous night; one girl was in bed by 7 and the rest of us turned in by 9; they made me sleep in the bed of the car on the shaky premise that I actually on occasion needed sleep. Putting someone in the driver's seat was not the wisest of moves since she intermittently “made the beep" during the night.

It was 700km to our next destination of Coober Pedy. We crossed the border into South Australia and encountered the first speed limit we had seen thus far; never has 110 felt so slow. The scenery somehow dropped to a level even less interesting than that of the northern territory. Trying to make the best of limited sight-seeing, Ashley made frequent comments about the clouds, trees, sheep and anything else that could be distinguished from the ubiquitous red dirt; my conversation skills were stretched to the limit as I managed such artful responses as “Yup… those sure are… cloudlike". As we approached the mining town of 3500, we began to see thousands of piles of dirt where prospectors had “noodled" for opals. Signs stressed the importance of not running or walking backwards as you could easily stumble into an unmarked 30m abyss. Coober's claim to fame is that half the population lives underground to escape the extreme temperatures (to the tune of 50C in the summer) and our trip to the visitor's centre soon turned into a bad Austin Powers sketch: “And where is the supermarket? … And is it… underground?? … Where is the mechanic? … Will he repair our car underground??"

We left our car at a perfectly boring above-ground station and went on foot to explore town. Our original plan had been to stay here in an underground campsite, but we soon discovered that it would be a serious challenge to kill enough time to justify it. We visited an underground church and a series of gem shops (one with free noodling for opals and an extensive collection of deadly scorpions and spiders). Our battery was eventually replaced and we made for the highway. The radio at first looked as if it wouldn't restart, and we agonized how we would have to spend the rest of the trip in silence, or even talking to each other. Luckily, this crisis was averted by an impressive engineering feat of looking it up in the manual.

Departing from my method of avoiding hitting wildlife by driving ridiculously slow, Ashley tore through the desert at 120, willing the animals to stay away from the road. This approach was effective as we only saw one emu on the 4-hour drive, and we made it to the Glendambo roadhouse intact.

Several hundred kilometres and not a whole lot else remained on the road to Adelaide. We drove through endless expanses of treeless desert with restricted military testing land to either side. We stopped in the cardboard-cutout military town of Woomera and explored a park filled with planes and artillery. A random woman pulled over and yelled at us about emus in a school field nearby. We went over and found one large bird and a bunch of smaller ones; I thought it would be funny to chase them, so I sprinted in their direction – at first they jogged away, but then the leader (rather correctly) assessed that I wasn't much of a match and turned to charge me; he made only a half-hearted attack and I left with eyes and other vital organs intact.

At Port Augusta we had a small ceremony (involving Hungry Jacks soft serve cones) to celebrate the completion of our epic journey from ocean to ocean. From here we drove past the Flinders ranges and Mt. Remarkable, through sheep country, and into the heart of Adelaide.

The legendary cross-outback train