ROADTRIP

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You can’t do road trips in England. They’d be over in 2 days unless you took a route through London and then it would take you 5. And anyway, imagine stopping at Sandbach Services on your hols…

Australia’s rather bigger though and we've just had a pretty effing fun four weeks driving at breakneck speeds heading for danger, excitement and caravan parks. If you've got half an hour, go make yourself a nice cup of tea before settling down to this one, it's long. While the rest of you wait for the tea makers, here's a timely pause...

So, it all began in the Sydney. Jenny had done some serious research and found that Hippie Campers would be the cheapest option. Excitement filled our nostrils as we headed downtown to meet our van/home/kitchen/new member of the family. As with all car hire companies, these lot love to throw in the hidden extras. One you’ve paid $15 dollars for a canister of gas (rrp $7 for 4), they tried throwing in a credit card fee on top of a credit card fee, the bastards. Alive to these kind of shenanigans, we weren’t about to be scammed like that! After a half hour phone to head office, it was agreed that we should not be forced to pay a credit card fee twice, and were reimbursed our 27 cents. Ahem.

But we weren’t embarrassed, we’d stood our ground, and proudly took the reigns of our Hippie Camper, a delightful Mitsubishi bedecked in purple and yellow flowers and butterflies! Peace man.

Our first port of call would be St Albans. Unlike the chavvy satellite town in England, this place is a really pretty, sleepy backwater a couple of hours north of Sydney. We pulled up outside the pub and got to grips with our new cooking and bedding facilities before heading in for a well deserved beer. As expected, the place was spit and sawdust, but then it all changed as it suddenly filled with teenagers. But not the kind who get a bit tipsy and disappear out the back to squeeze their hands up and down one another's shirts and shorts, oh no daddio. These lot were on a religious retreat and before we could shout 'HERATIC' we found ourselves in the middle of a meet and greet session with Father Trendy O'God. As the introduction session arced its way round the group and towards us, we soon realised that our road trip could go horrible halo shaped on the first night. But it was too late! He'd got us! I watched aghast as Jenny introduced herself and told the group how she was hoping to gain some peace and quiet from the retreat....NOOOOOO! Too many waters had obviously been sneakily changed into wine for our Jenny and it took a while for priest boy to realise we weren't part of his flock. Luckily he was distracted by a local chap who was even more pissed than Jenny and had got the priest's attention by committing himself to a church session the following day. Knowing that he had foolishly gone the furthest, we beat a retreat to the van. If we could, we'd have repented and drank 5 bloody Mary's, but we didn't have the ingredients.

You'd think that after a scrape like that, Jen would be keeping off the sauce, but our next port of call was the Hunter Valley where they grow wellington boots. Actually they grow grapes and that was a crap joke for the benefit of the gentleman farmers among you. My role was established: drive Jenny round every 'cellar door' in the area and watch her get progressively sozzled on minuscule mouthfuls of wine. Needless to say we didn't actually buy any wine. We soon realised that everyone in the Hunter Valley shares a similar level of jolly drunkenness - the kind which high court judges and MP's consider suitable for driving so long as you're wearing a tie, but if you're blue collar you get 3 years. One lady announced to us late in the afternoon that with the sun so low she has to drive home with her head hanging out the window so she can follow the white lines in the road. 'No, good lady. You're a drunk. You drive that way because you top up your levels with alarming regularity and your head lurches out of the window whether you like it or not.' This lady's slurring disposition betrayed a good knowledge of her produce though, so we bought a bottle of port from her.

Now one problem we've discovered when you're in a camper van is that it's often a bit tricky to 'water the horse' in the middle of the night. As we're both a bit older than we used to be, we can't seem to get through the night without a 3am trip to the lav. The camper van lifestyle turns you into a very old person indeed. You go to bed when it gets dark and you wake up when it's light. It's all quite pleasant really and brings you back to nature (especially when you're pissing into a bush not knowing if that twig's a twig or maybe a snake). The other thing that old people do is queue outside Aldi at 8.40am waiting for it open...and so did we! For a moment there was a flash of the future as Jenny joined the blue and grey headed throngs for the gold rush behind those sliding doors... Of course we were driving round in a camper van, we can't deny it. It's the younger generation's version of a caravan; a sort of pre-arthritic pod before the aching bones beg for a behemoth Winnebago and all the comforts of a Spanish villa on wheels. We didn't quite match the efforts of one caravan we passed which had a poster in the back declaring 'We play bridge'. We momentarily hoped that the owners of this caravan were being ironic, but in truth, it was only a hope. So we decided that we might put our own sign in our camper van: 'We swing' or 'Honk if you do dogging'. But we never.

Instead we whiled our way up the coast. We visited loads of beautiful beaches where absolutely no other people could be seen for miles. Seal Rocks was home to some stunning beaches and a lighthouse from where there's a panorama of easily 270 degrees. It's a far cry from the beaches of home where every inch of sand is swarmed on by 'lovelies' and Sun photographers as soon as the thermometer hits double figures. We inched our way up the coast, saw our first pod of dolphins and also met our first koala in Port Macquarie. Then we headed in land (a bit) to the groovy town of Bellingen where the pace is slow and relaxed. It was in Bellingen that we struggled to find a place to park up and were very happy to accept an offer from an English couple, Jacqui and Simon, to park at the bottom of their garden. It was a great example of the amazing hospitality of people in Oz, and we were happy for the excuse to glug our port in the name of gratitude.

From there we drove up to the Dorrigo National Park where I was delighted to find an area where we could light a fire without getting told off. There are few happier moments than when a man can toast his crumpets over a camp fire. Tragically, our final crumpet was swiped by a gang of magpies (crows in hoodies) and the day was in tatters.

We headed back onto the coast and up town Byron Bay. As with most 'hippy' places, everyone says that the hippy days are long gone, and they're probably right. Afterall, the only reference to hippies we actually saw was the daubing on our van. True, there were one or two crusties strumming Bob Dylan songs on the pavement, but most of the towns houses are multi million dollar dream homes and all the shops sell designer swimwear, designer clothes or designer food. Not very hippyish. And like the rushed, uptight capitalists that we are, we didn't have time to hang around, lovely though it was. We'd booked ourselves on a couple of trips much further up the coast and had to get a chip on to reach the Whitsundays, roughly 4 light years north.

The journey north was long, but we were kept constantly amused by the road signs along the way. You barely have time to look at the road itself there's so many warnings and so much information. Most are for road safety: 'Survive this drive' or 'Stop, Revive, Survive' and they all use a pretty simple rhyming method that most 3 year olds have mastered. But sometimes they don't work. There was one which read 'Hit the skids, not the kids' - surely that just encourages dangerous driving? If you're skidding you'll probably still hit the kids and then the sign maker will be in all sorts of trouble. We found ourselves making up our own which we'll submit to the Australian government forthwith.
'Don't be a gallaa, and crash your car'
'For god's sakes, don't slam your brakes (in wet weather)'
'Don't be a shit, stay on the grit'
Ok so they have their uses, namely they make a very long journey marginally less boring. Anyway, the landscape gave way to increasingly flat and arid scenes, and it all began to look a bit more like the Australia we had in mind. En route we did have time to stop and pet kangaroos on the beach at Cape Hillsborough, and we went inland to Eungalla where we saw Duck-Billed-Platypuses. It's incredible that the Aboriginals still make them, hats off to them I say. Then bemusingly we went for a 31km walk through the rainforest. Apparently only Paula Radcliffe has ever walked further in one day.

Finally we reached Airlie beach, our northernmost point from where we hopped onto the good ship 'Reality Is...' for our dream sail round the paradise islands of the Whitsundays. Unfortunately it was a catamaran whose sails were only unveiled for photos, while the 36 souls on board shivered their way over choppy waters before embarking on the only means possible to keep warm, getting horribly drunk. Everyone had bought gallons of 'goon', which is dirt cheap bladders of boxed wine. Bladdered on bladders, how apt. Before we'd disembarked everyone was shitfaced. Everyone got progressively more shitfaced on land, where a very muddled Ant managed to go to sleep in completely the wrong room. The following days diving was the perfect hangover cure, as it was tantamount to having you head dipped in freezing cold water until all the alcohol residing in your brain has frozen solid and dropped to your toes. There was no doubt we were on the cheap boat. The breathing apparatus was hanging on by threads and the only people with wet suits were the guys who worked on the boat. Honestly, it was that cold that my nipples almost poked the eyes out of the fish! We just about managed to get back to the boat before rigour mortis set in, then shivered on a small, though wonderfully white beach while groups of more divers walked the plank.

I was very proud to note that the Whitsundays all share their names with places in Cumbria. The beach that everyone wants to see is Whitehaven beach, very much like its Cumbrian counterpart without the high levels of radiation and used condoms. There's also Kewsick, Penrith, Carlisle and even Brampton. Needless to say the Whitsundays aren't quite as beautiful as their namesakes, but on this occasion, they were similarly cold.

When we got back to dry land everyone was drunk again and that was more or less the only way to get through the trip. It would have been an 18-30 trip were it not for the fact that one member of the group was over 30 (ahem). We were quite glad to get back to Airlie, which wasn't quite what we'd expected, but then we had to zoom back down to southern Queensland to go on another trip to Fraser Island.

We knew what to expect this time. We'd booked this trip as part of the same deal so we knew our kit would be iffy at best. In the case of Fraser Island your kit consists of a 4x4 jeep amongst other bits and bobs. The plan here is to get a ferry over to this very beautiful and sandy island and spend a couple of days 'off-roading' in your jeep whilst avoiding getting ANY salt water on the vehicle. This promised to be an adventure, and proved to be just that.

Day 1 was fine. We drove round a bit, saw a lovely lake and all that boring stuff. But on days 2 it all got a little bit scary. On departure we were given a sheet with the high and low tides written on it so that we didn't get trapped by the sea when driving up the beach. Fine. Understood. But no one told us about the EFFING CYCLONE on its way did they?! 4 hours before high tide we thought the sea was looking rather high up the beach and we were a long way from base camp. A jeep that had been left on the beach was quickly being guzzled by the sea and the 11 of us who crammed into ours failed to push it to safety. It was time to try and rescue ourselves. We had about 7km of beach to beat a retreat, but the beach was only 2 or 3 metres wide in places and getting smaller by the minute. Up steps AC360! I volunteered to drive the treacherous journey back with ten passengers who were bricking it almost as much as me. After about 10 minutes we spotted another jeep entrenched in the soaking sand, with the sea sniffing at its wheel arches - it was one of the other 2 groups we had booked the trip with. Quick decision time: 9 of our passengers got out to help dig out the other jeep while me and Jen took our jeep off to find high ground. The storm was closing in and so was the sea and by golly we nearly rolled it a couple of times, but we found a spot just before the sea completely cut us off and eventually our 9 other passengers found us. We then sat in the jeep, all 11 of us as the storm parted dropped its pants and shat all over us for hours on end.

After 6 hours sitting in the jeep, Jenny, me and one of the other guys set off like a trio of Ernest Shackletons in search of help. We stumbled across a camp made by 8 Aussie blokes escaping from their wives for a spot of fishing who were more than happy to get wind of the fact that there might be some damsels in distress in need of some warmth and food. Our portly hosts served up a hearty dinner of spag bol while those of us that still thought we were adventurers pressed them for advice about the best time to leave. Eventually it was decided that a night skirmish along the beach at low tide was the only way out. And so we waited nervously before making a terrifying final dash to a safe camp. It's hard to describe quite how genuinely scary all this was, but there's a photo on here somewhere which shows what happened to one slightly less lucky jeep.

For the second time in a week, we were delighted to get back to the mainland. It was quite an eventful final flurry for our road trip and it was only when we were all safely back that we were able to talk about the fact that the previous night's spag bol had been more than a little overcooked. It left us with only three days to get back down to Sydney. Just enough time to take a detour inland and see, yet again, the crazy changes of landscape as the world became completely flat for the first time since Ptolemy announced 'hold on a minute, I've got a theory...'. Our three day journey gave us time for a final muse on the names of caravans that we invariably spent hours sitting behind - Viscount, Pedigree, Heritage - which all ache to sound regal but end up sounding like miniature sculpture collections you can buy with tokens in the Daily Mail. We were glad to get one last night in at a national park, where the emus, koalas and 'roos of the Warrumbungle kept us entertained.

And that was that. We returned safely to Sydney, without a scratch on our beloved Hippy Camper. We clocked up 5,500km in just under 4 weeks and only managed to break one glass. More long term damage might have been caused though, as Jenny is now dead set on buying a camper van and is particularly taken by the humongous Winnebago's that can only be driven on a pilot's licence. It was a sad day when we had to hand back our little mobile home and set up camp in a hostel that made Barnsley look like Henley on Thames. Honestly, it housed the biggest collection of pea brained dumb ass eejits either of us has ever witnessed. The sort of Brits who land in Sydney ‘travelling’ only to find that they’re still parked at Bondi Beach 6 months later. But for those who haven't already been told, we've found a more sedate place to stay. We've set up home in Bronte, just down from Bondi, where we'll be staying for....well we don't know. For a while. so the blogs might just ebb off for a while as the travelling ceases, but we'll be back.

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Photos

us
windswept at seal rocks

our first kaola
they may be slow, but capturing, skinning and eating them is harder than you may think

Dorrigo NP
behind the waterfalls

lunching behind some sand dunes
just up the road from Bundjalung

nice cup of tea
the critical moment of every day, several times a day. as you can see, our cooking facilities weren't expansive, but they boiled a good kettle

plattypus
amazingly, aborignals still make these

AC360
crashed a boat at Cape Hillsborough

drinking games
Ant got coerced into drinking a can of beer mixed with a cup of vin rouge through a snorkel. fortunately most of it ended up on the deck without passing his stomach

jenny on fraser island
for about half a day, fraser was paradise

the real fraser island
this is how it looked most of the time

sunrise at warrenbungle
with the telescope in the background. kangaroos are great astronomers and it was them that names Venus

Comments

[Letty]

Hurry, book now....
Having been thrilled and excited by the above account, I was amused to see Butlins being advertised on the same page.

[pads]

how about, 'avoid a shunt, don't drive like a ....' - perhaps not.

[Mel]

D'you know what, Ant: you're very funny. Very funny indeed.