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Out the Back

By Jace K

January 3^rd, 2018

Out the Back

It’s 3,000 kilometres from Darwin to Adelaide. That’s more or less the distance from Germany to Iran. Like that trip we’ll do it without flying, but this time we’ll drive ourselves, to finally see what’s in the centre of this country, to see if it’s nothing or something, and feel how big it really is.

We start our drive by plane, in Darwin, before dawn. We walk the one kilometre from the small airport to the closest hotel, the only place nearby that’s open at this time and might serve something to eat. There’s no footpath and we walk along the road. Sodium street lights burn orange and dry eucalyptus leaves gather in piles in the gutter, just like they do everywhere in Australia. There are no other people or cars.

It’s still dark when we arrive, and we sit outside by the pool to eat while the sun rises quickly over the palm trees. Slowly other guests arrive. After breakfast we get a taxi into town and check in to a hostel; it’s full of backpackers. We mingle as best we can but it’s awkward. They’re all much younger, extremely hung over, and we’re the only ones not speaking French.

I’ve been away from Australia for a few years now and it’s a strange feeling being back. No phone, no car, no idea where I am. No different from the other tourists.

Within a week we’ve organised SIM cards, a four-wheel drive kitted out as a camper, and everything else we need. We touch the sea on this side of the continent and head south, towards the other side, towards home I suppose, whatever that means…

We leave Darwin in the afternoon and make it a short way out before dark. At the campground we fuss around with the new gear, trying to get into some routine. At night, the ground is covered in thousands of brilliant points of light reflecting back at us in the torch light. Looking closely we discover they’re the eyes of spiders. The next morning we shower in an outdoor cubicle with no door or roof, stepping carefully to avoid the cane toads.

Today we’ll head to Kakadu National Park, one of the more famous attractions around here. The park’s pretty big—just slightly smaller than Slovenia—and it’ll take a few days to drive through it.

Over the next couple of days we do some small walks around the billabongs and try our best to fight the mosquitos. We visit Ubirr, a site where aboriginal rock art has been continuously painted for over 40,000 years, and take pictures of people taking pictures of themselves in front of the sunset over the floodplain.

We camp away from the crocodiles and mostly also from other people. One evening, our only neighbour is a young English couple. We prepare dinner as the guy does push-ups and the girl practices the hula hoop in her underwear. She’s pretty good.

The next major town out here is Katherine. We stay at a caravan park, not usually our favourite place, but to our surprise find that every single person we speak to has an interesting story. There’s a group of Model A Ford enthusiasts who have driven their 85 year old cars 4,000 kilometres across Australia, heading to a club meet in Darwin. One guy has a single spare tyre left, and if he gets a puncture after that he’ll be in trouble because apparently you can’t buy those tyres in Australia. Other people we speak to had sold their homes and have been travelling for years, putting our little trip in some perspective.

And this is a theme that will repeat throughout the trip: caravan people are actually extremely interesting, it turns out. At least outback caravan people.

The next day we head towards Daly Waters, a town more or less in the middle of nowhere. On the way we stop at some thermal springs. The people there tell us they saw a turtle. We look everywhere but find only retirees and more of the attractive French backpackers.

Further south the vegetation thins and becomes less green. There’s less water out here. The soil changes to dust; it’s fine and varies from deep orange to purply red, just as you’d imagine the outback to be. The kilometres roll on. We keep the truck under a hundred so it doesn’t burn so much fuel and the hours lazily slide past.

We finally pull into the Daly Waters pub/caravan park just on sunset, happily in time for happy hour, which I suppose is why they call it that. After the nearly deserted highway it’s a surprise to see the place completely packed. A couple plays country music in a small band stand out the back. I don’t like country music, but here it somehow makes sense. We sit and listen for a while and order another round of expensive beers from the European backpackers behind the bar (no longer happy hour). As the hunks of barbecued beef and barramundi start to appear from the kitchen we finish our drinks and head back to the car to cook pasta.

The next day we get expensive fuel and head out again. Not too far away (in outback terms) we come to Newcastle Waters. It’s supposed to be a bit of a ghost town and we’re keen to look around. It’s not quite tumbleweeds but it’s clear that not much is going on. We stop and take some pictures like idiot tourists. Some locals drive past, looking at us, and I feel a little bit like we’re not really supposed to be there. There’s a couple of historic buildings—sheds, really—and inside posters explain the lives of the people who used to drive cattle across the country. We try really hard to be interested.

In the afternoon we turn right off the highway and head down an unmarked corrugated four-wheel drive track. We’d read about a camp site somewhere around here but don’t know exactly where it is and there aren’t any signs. After about 10 kilometres, we arrive, completely unexpectedly, at a sizeable lake surrounded by caravans. In the outback. So bizarre. We drive around until we find a quiet spot, which takes about half an hour and a little off-roading. Our nearest neighbours are equipped with a petrol generator, a quad bike, a small boat and a medium-to-large sized bus. After arguing together about whether or not our car was parked level we spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing. Easily the nicest place we’ve found so far.

The next day it’s sandwiches for breakfast and back to the highway. We get fuel at Tennant Creek and then keep driving until we reach the Devils (sic) Marbles. We spend the afternoon sitting in the shade of the car to escape the heat of the day. At golden hour we go for a walk around the boulders and add our amateur attempt at photography to the great steaming pile already created at this remarkable place.

The facilities at the campsite include a pit toilet and free wi‑fi with signs encouraging you to share your pictures. Appropriate hash tags are suggested. We check our email on our phones but I can’t figure out how to upload my film…

After sunset it’s sandwiches again for dinner. The people next to us fry sausages. Later in the evening a camper van arrives full of foreign backpacker girls. They make a little noise as they set up, but the fuss increases as they discover a spider. I think about going over to help them but then realise that, even though I grew up in Australia, my total knowledge of spiders is limited to about three species and I probably couldn’t even tell if it was dangerous or not. And so I leave them to it. They soon decide it’s a tarantula and move camp spots.

At night, for the first time since I can remember, it’s not uncomfortably hot.

At sunrise we get up again to add some more photos to the heap, and then back to the camp for some cereal with powdered milk. The other campers fry bacon. Even so, they manage to leave earlier than us, including the camper girls. I’m not sure they even saw the rocks. Eventually we pack and leave as well. It’s been a few days on the road and I’m starting to feel like a shower.

We stop again at Wycliffe Well (a town, not a well), where the fuel is inexplicably cheap. The petrol station features an exuberant UFO theme. Apparently there are a lot of sightings out here but we don’t have time to find out. Inside I pay and pick up a Midnight Oil CD. The car stereo has no line-in jack and there’s no radio in the outback, of course, which means this CD will be our only music for the entire trip.

Midnight Oil. Like the country music at the pub at Daly Waters, it just makes more sense out here. For the rest of the trip we watch the lyrics play out through the window of the car. “No one goes out back and that’s that”, Peter Garrett laments. Well, Peter, we’re finally here.

Further on we stop for a burger at Barrow Creek Pub, which is more or less the sum total of the settlement of Barrow Creek. Outside three Aboriginal people sit and drink beer. As we eat, one comes in and buys three cigarettes for six dollars. We don’t notice any creek.

We make another stop at a town called Ti-Tree, but the fuel’s too expensive and we move on. As we leave we pass the caravan park with its high fence and heavy security gate. People loiter around as we pass, none of them white. It feels menacing, like some kind of frontier town. This is not the same Australia as in the cities.

In the late afternoon we stop at an art gallery in Aileron, another of these tiny settlements. Out the back is a big male red Kangaroo and a pig, along with some ducks that strangely all share a paddock together. The pig and kangaroo are evidently friends; as we watch, the pig tries to mount the kangaroo. We leave them to it.

At sunset we pull off into the bush and drive a short distance through the scrub until we find a quiet spot to camp. We make our evening sandwiches and boil some water for tea. The wind picks up as the sun drops below the horizon and it’s suddenly quite cold. A single car passes during the night. Still no shower.

Somehow this trip across Australia feels like a kind of pilgrimage. It feels like coming home even though I’ve never been here before. It’s as if this central Australia, with its dry red dust and blue skies and infinite open space and no people—this is where I come from. It’s like all that is uniquely Australian is most pure here. It’s not that Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra aren’t Australia too, but this is more real, more authentic. Or perhaps it’s just more like the postcards.

* * *

The next day we refuel the truck from the jerry cans. We make it to a campground before lunch and finally get a shower. Some of the other campers have brought quad bikes and use them to transport their overweight selves between their tent and the toilets. That’s how we know we’re in Australia: people drive everywhere, even to go and take a shit.

Clouds gather in the afternoon, probably the first we’ve seen since we arrived on the continent.

The next day we’re back on the highway heading for Alice. We eat leftovers at a rest stop at the Tropic of Capricorn as an elderly couple tries to get to a pile of discarded dog treats on the other side of a fence. Soon we reach the outskirts of the city and suddenly the scenery changes. There’s more clouds and low mountains and green grass! Not really very outback-y. The caravan park is all boom gates and barbed wire, and we find our spot next to a white van with blacked out windows and a big aerial sticking out the top. A little later we meet its owner, an affable, extremely talkative man who is clearly completely mad. He recounts to us his various conspiracy theories including all the times he saw UFOs, and the behaviours and motivations of their occupants. It’s quite interesting but we’re extremely busy and excuse ourselves to go and do some, uh, campsite-y things.

Our time in Alice is spent restocking our supplies and preparing for the next part of the journey. We visit a supermarket, which feels unusual. A cop stands out the front of every bottle shop. In the evening we fry sausages in the rain.

The next morning we pack up our things wet, get fuel, fill all the jerry cans, load them back onto the roof and head towards the MacDonnell Ranges. We eat lunch sitting on the twisted trunk of a huge red gum growing out of a dry river bed. Afterwards, we walk down the dry river to a small waterhole at the end. At the shore a woman in hippy pants sits meditating. Rock wallabies bounce amongst the rocks on the hill above us and strict signs tell us not to approach them.

In the evening we sit by the fire with some other campers. Food just tastes so much better when cooked over burning wood. I wonder if perhaps we sometimes forget about these simple things, and if, in an unthinking quest for convenience, we somehow organise our lives to miss out on what is actually good. Cave men didn’t have smart phones or nice cars, but their meat tasted better every single night.

We spend the next day hiking and visiting the gorges. By late afternoon we find another campsite with great views of the mountains covered in golden light, but the sun goes down while we’re still setting up and preparing dinner and we don’t really have time to enjoy it. We eat in the dark and climb into the car to go to bed. There’s not much to do out here after the sun goes down and we find ourselves asleep by nine. Tonight the wind howls in the pitch blackness outside.

The next few days are spent much the same way. We walk through dry river beds, scale the hills and look down at the gorges.

One afternoon, as we drive along the partially flooded roads looking for a place to camp, we come to a site and find it occupied by exactly one man, his abused two-wheel drive car and a loud radio. He looks happy and we leave him to it. The next campsite is all caravans, solar panels and satellite dishes but we stay anyway. In the evening we again sit by a large communal fire. Some of the other campers are farmers from up north and patronise everyone about their knowledge of farming and doing it tough. Lotte isn’t Australian and so gets away with asking what they’re talking about during the flyblown sheep conversation. I sit there in the darkness stupidly, pretending to understand but really just looking into the fire.

We spend a couple of days at this place, just sort of sitting around and not doing much. It’s good. I feel we kind of need it. People think that when you travel, even when you travel for a long time, that you’re on holiday, but it can sometimes be the opposite. Weekends don’t mean anything and there’s a risk that you’re busy every day just trying to find somewhere to eat and sleep and never take time to rest, or to think.

And so now there’s some time, I reflect a little about the trip and what we’re doing. We started this trip with more or less the minimum amount of luggage. There are some backpackers who take less, but most pack more than us. We find that travelling with less is usually more convenient for a range of reasons, and mostly you don’t need all that extra stuff anyway. And then we reached Australia and somehow went from two small bags each to a two tonne truck and all the gear to go with it. And the gear is all cheap, disposable shit, completely vanquishing my “few things, well made” philosophy, and not exactly the minimalist travel we were expecting. But that’s the thing: just because you travel without much doesn’t mean you don’t use a lot, you just rent the extra stuff from other people. Other people cook your dinner and wash your clothes and dishes and rent you a bed or a table or a desk or whatever you want. Out here we have to bring everything with us. Well, nearly everything. We still don’t have a shower…

And as for Australia and the outback? So far we’ve crossed half the country but still never really felt like we reached anywhere remote. Along this main route at least, there are always people not too far away, always signs of civilisation. And even if you only look at the landscape it’s also not nothing. It’s not like the whole of the centre of Australia is a giant, empty car park. It’s full of trees and grasses and birds and mountains and dry river beds and sand the colour of a thousand reds and oranges and purples and, well, just Australia. It’s filled with what everywhere used to be filled with before the Europeans came and killed everything and started pretending it was a new country that they just invented then.

Later, back in Germany, I read a report that two British tourists died near here “in the outback”. I suppose it’s technically the outback, but except for a certain famous rock, it’s pretty much the most popular place to go in this part of Australia.

Now we’re back on the road, heading for that big rock, but first we’ll make a short detour. Palm Valley is an unusual place. For reasons people don’t fully understand there’s a population of palm trees out here, in the middle of the desert, where the nearest trees of the same species are 1,000 km away in Katherine. We’re keen to check it out and do a little four-wheel driving along the way. We cross a couple of shallow rivers and easily make it to the campsite. Most of the cars here are white Toyota Land Cruisers, and most are driven by Germans, but one couple is Swiss. The campsite sits alongside a small river with purply-red sandstone hills all around. After driving by ourselves along a bush track most of the day it’s strange to see so many people all stopped at exactly the same place. But of course they did, because you’re not allowed to camp in the wild, but it still feels weird.

We walk to the top of one of the nearby hills and sit and watch the amazing light as the sun goes down. I take a couple more pictures of lens flares.

After a dinner of sandwiches (this time with beer) we climb back into the truck for bed and fall asleep to the campground noises.

Today we head into the valley itself. The track in isn’t very long—only a couple of kilometres—but it’s signposted as a “high clearance four-wheel drive” track, the meaning of which we aren’t exactly able to pin down. We have a four-wheel drive, but how much clearance is “high clearance”? Most other people out here have four-wheel drives with raised suspension. Is that what we’re supposed to have?

We decide to go in anyway, and just see how far we get. Immediately the track is noticeably rougher than anything we’ve driven on before. We crawl over the rocks and up the small gullies, scraping off the sand at the tops of the ridges with whatever the lowest part of the car is. There are several water crossings and before each one, Lotte gets out of the car to find a route on foot first. At one point we cross a river by way of a kind of underwater land bridge that isn’t much wider than the truck, with drops on either side leading to pools of water several metres deep. At another crossing we drive out across an expanse of water, following a path of coloured streamers tied to sticks stuck into the ground or onto bushes, but not really seeing the ground itself or how deep the water is. It takes us about an hour to get in—to be honest it would have been faster to walk—and the whole time I’m wondering how the hell we’re going to get out again.

The valley is as described. It’s full of strange palm trees forming a kind of oasis in the middle of this arid place. Except right now it isn’t really arid as there has been so much rain, so the contrast with the rest of the country isn’t so big.

Like most challenges, when you get to them they’re not as bad as you imagine, and so it was with the drive out. Especially after we learned that low range and diff locks are for rock climbing as well as driving through deep sand.

Back at the campsite the German backpackers are changing into their bikinis to go for a late afternoon swim in the river and I wonder why I didn’t go backpacking in Australia when I was younger.

The next day we’re in the car again, heading towards King’s Canyon, which is a big-ish hole in the ground along a bad-ish road en route to a big-ish rock. We stop for lunch at a particularly photogenic Holden wreck (just as Peter Garrett promised), rusting majestically in the midday sun. A few minutes later the German backpackers drive past. I guess there’s really only one road out here.

We reach a camp site at a small pass in some low hills and decide to camp early. As the afternoon wears on, some other campers arrive, including the Germans. We make a fire and cook dinner and watch the sun set again. The smell of the cooking attracts the dingoes and we chase them away while tending the fire and watching the food.

We climb into bed and I can’t help notice that we just drove 200 km along a rough, corrugated dirt track in the middle of nowhere to once again come to the only place for miles also occupied by other people. The guy in the caravan next to us plays his AM radio the whole night, which sort of drowns out the sound of the howling dingoes.

The next morning we reach the canyon. It’s busy, and we join the other tourists on the most popular walk, amongst the beehive shaped rocks and to the top and around the lip. A sign at the start warns us that the walk involves 500 steps, which I secretly laugh at, having completed much more difficult climbs before, but by the end of the day I’ll find my knees hurt anyway. Along the route other signs refer to the traditional owners of the site but we don’t see any aboriginal people and are not sure if anyone ever does anything at these sacred sites anymore.

At the bottom we fill some more air into the tyres as we’ll be back driving on bitumen for the next few days. Our air compressor proves nearly completely useless, and we discover that if we really needed to fill a tyre from empty it would probably take us several hours. Well, good to know before it happens, I guess.

By late afternoon we pull off the road and take a small track over some low dunes to find a quiet camping spot amongst the desert oaks. We dig a fire pit in the sand and collect bark to burn.

It’s morning again and the drive to the rock isn’t far. We stop on the way and turn down a track leading nowhere in particular to eat lunch. It’s scrub country and amongst the bushes are dozens of different birds. As we wander between the trees we suddenly hear that familiar kak-kak-kak sound probably known to anyone who’s ever been to any pet shop anywhere. Soon enough we find the source: half a dozen bright green and yellow budgerigars, enthusiastically squabbling and flitting around the bushes. It’s kind of strange. My first reaction without thinking is that they somehow escaped and got out here, but of course they’re wild. Only they don’t really seem wild. They play and mess about like budgies do everywhere, and don’t seem particularly afraid of us. I hold my finger out to see if one flies over to land on it.

By late afternoon we reach Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. A quick trip to the visitors centre reveals an extremely dated video and installations about the aboriginal dreamtime that are hard to follow. We scout out the various designated sunset and sunrise viewing areas ahead of time and then discover fluids leaking from the car. This turns out to be extremely bad, which out here, around 500 km from the nearest large town, probably means extremely expensive. We limp the car out of the park and to the campground in the nearby settlement of Yulara, and park it. Thankfully, there is a mechanic here in this tiny place, but it’s the Saturday of a long weekend and they won’t be open until Tuesday. It’s a rather low moment of the trip. We try to be thankful we’re not on the side of the road in the desert and figure out what to do for the next couple of days without a car.

The next day we decide to make the most of our situation and go to visit the rock anyway. There is actually car hire here but it is very expensive, and sold out anyway. There’s also a bus going the short distance to the rock but two return tickets cost as much as the expensive car hire, which we just can’t stomach. The only option left seems to be to hitch a ride. I mean, there’s only one road and every single person out here is driving along it to the same place we want to go. How hard could it be? Not hard at all, it turns out. After about eight minutes we’re seated comfortably on leather, chatting to an amiable couple from Cootamundra who kindly deliver us to the foot of Uluru.

A sign at the carpark instructs us not to climb up. Next to it is a list of safety warnings we should keep in mind in case we decide to climb up anyway. We start the walk around the base instead, and now get our first close up look at this enormous rock. It really is very big and it’s hard to properly get a sense of the scale. All the postcards you’ve seen show it as kind of shaped like a loaf of bread, but its shape is much more complex with gorges and valleys all around. The surface looks like it’s made of huge scales, parts bluey-grey, others reddy-brown. The colours change with the light throughout the day.

Along the way there are many signs about this being a sacred place but we don’t see any aborigines and the descriptions of the traditional stories don’t really explain anything, either. We just have to trust their word (which we do), but it really is entirely on trust. Like at King’s Canyon, the experience doesn’t take us any closer to understanding why this place is considered sacred or what sort of sacred things might happen here. Instead there’s noise from the tourists, the nearby road and the scenic helicopter flights overhead. It certainly doesn’t feel like the heart of Australia and it’s hard to detect any spirituality at all. But it does look pretty good for business, which is what modern Australia is all about, anyway.

On the way back we catch a lift with four women from Melbourne in one of the expensive hire cars. We squish in even though the car’s full and we’re reminded of what’s good in Australians.

The next day we try our luck again, this time hoping to get to the other famous landmark in the area, Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas). Again, a retired couple stop to pick us up and we spend the morning with them, stopping at all the lookouts and listening to their stories about working with indigenous communities in places we haven’t heard of. It’s extremely interesting and we learn that there are still communities where people live a more or less traditional life, hunting kangaroos and gathering traditional foods, but it’s a life halfway between traditional and modern, and often the communities are dirty and unhygienic and the people malnourished. It’s astounding how this part of Australia is so completely removed from the city life most Australians (and tourists) experience.

The rocks at Kata Tjuta look completely different from Uluru. They’re made of some sort of conglomerate, like a natural concrete cementing in large, round stones, some as big as watermelons.

At the end of the day we discuss where might be best to stand to get a lift home when a car drives past. We stick out a thumb and it stops. The two women inside provide a complete and utter contrast to the thoughtful, interesting and intelligent people who gave us a lift this morning. They say nothing interesting and exhibit everything that is bad about Australian culture. They are here only to be entertained and are not the slightest bit interested in listening or looking or learning about the place they have come to visit. They refer to Kata Tjuta by the name of another, unrelated national park and are unfamiliar with the name “Yulara”, the town we are all staying at, the one they flew in to, the only one within 500 kilometres of here. One of the women regretted not chipping off a bit of the rock as a souvenir, her only reservation that it would have been too much weight in her already overloaded suitcase. Their heads are still in Melbourne and they are not interested or able to change that.

That’s what happens with air travel. You just pop in to somewhere 2,000 km away and your head is still wherever you left a couple of hours ago. We saw it in Dubai after travelling through Iran and now we’re seeing it here. If you arrive by road you arrive tired and smelly and appreciate the distance you’ve travelled and where you are. Arriving in Yulara was the first time we saw a shop or had mobile phone reception for several days. We were amazed there was any civilisation out here at all. These people who have just flown in have never left it. They don’t really get that they’re in the middle of the desert and instead just complain at the lack of convenient toilets.

It’s a real problem. Not everyone has a week to drive to Uluru and back. But if you don’t do it that way, if you don’t drive for days through the desert, if you just drop in from the sky for the weekend, which is what most people do, then you don’t really see what’s here. You think you do. You see a big rock with sand around it and take a photo from the designated photo taking place and check it off your bucket list—congratulations, you’re now a real Australian—but you stay in your fucking resort hotel and go to your light show in the evening and watch your artificial aboriginal “cultural” dance show and sip your fucking cappuccino and drive on the newly paved roads and make calls on your phone and don’t really understand that all the other roads out here aren’t paved and there isn’t phone reception and there aren’t any shops or hotels or light shows or fucking cappuccinos and that you haven’t really seen what’s out here at all.

* * *

The car isn’t fixed on Tuesday. Parts are required and they will take days to get here from Adelaide.

One evening we chat with our neighbours at the campsite. They’re a farming couple with three kids on a six week trip. We exchange travel tips and talk about farming, solar energy, Europe, aboriginal issues. They farm sheep and crops and the whole family agrees they can’t live without the wide open space. I can relate. I think about the end of our trip and our life in Europe afterwards.

Another evening a couple turn up with a huge camper truck with slide out rooms towing a giant boat. The guy asks where the water is to stick his boat in and laughs. It’s pretty funny. The next day the couple leave early and give us their still partially valid three day pass to the park so we hitch hike in again to take the same photo as everyone else at the sunset photo taking location. Wouldn’t want to miss that. The next day we go to the cafe and drink a cappuccino.

Finally the truck is ready and we can leave. It’s late in the afternoon—nearly dark actually—but we’re fed up with the place and want to get out. By the time we get to the highway it’s dark, which is never a good time to drive in the bush unless you like decorating the front of your car with dead animals, but we risk it for 25 kilometres and then pull off into the sand and find a spot to camp.

We’re up at dawn and drive. Curtin Springs, fuel at Erldunda and across the South Australian border. We want to detour off the paved highway and drive the 617 km Oodnadatta Track from Marla to Marree but it’s only open if the road conditions are good. At the roadhouse at Marla we ask about the conditions but they have no clue. We decide to start on the track anyway and see how far we get. We hit the dirt as the sun starts to set. After half an hour it’s nearly dark and not a great idea to continue. We pull off into the bushes and park for the night, front facing the road, because, you know, just in case we need a quick getaway.

The next morning we’re up before dawn to make the most of the short daylight. There’s ice on the car and we leave without eating. The country changes quickly to open plain and we spot some cattle, emus, camels and—kind of strangely—the first wild kangaroos of the trip.

We make good time and at the town of Oodnadatta order Oodnaburgers at the Pink Roadhouse for lunch. There’s no phone reception but at the roadhouse there’s a printed out weather report. It should be clear today but we’re a little worried about some rain forecast for the coming days. If there’s more than five millimetres of rain the road will be closed. There’s no weather report for the towns we’re heading to so we’ll have to risk it. We get more fuel and deflate the tyres.

The road is rough in parts and muddy but otherwise fine. The Oodnadatta Track roughly follows the old Ghan train line that used to link Adelaide with Alice Springs. Most of the rails have been torn up for scrap but many rotting sleepers and embankments are still visible. We pass deserted railway sidings and at Algebuckina stop at a 500 m long iron railway bridge. Because it’s Australia the bridge is fenced off and we aren’t allowed to walk on it. Too dangerous, you see. You can drive out into the desert on your own completely unprepared but just don’t walk on the bridge.

As the sun drops we find another abandoned railway siding and pull over for the night. This one is deserted. There’s no trees around and the view of the stars is panoramic. After dark a single road train passes.

Over the last couple of days the feeling of space out here has been immense. It’s finally a place that feels remote. I realise that I seem to be drawn to places that either have a very high population density or a very low one. Big cities are exciting and have things to do and the convenience of being able to get around without a car; out here in the bush you have the silence and the space. Suburbia seems be be an awkward middle ground: not enough space to get away from things, too much space to be near to anything.

By the afternoon the next day we pass the settlement of William Creek and the turnoff to Lake Eyre. Disappointingly the road is closed because of the rain. The road to Marree is currently still open but we learn there’s 10 millimetres of rain forecast for this evening. We go on anyway.

Now the country changes again and really starts to look like how you’d imagine desert: red sand, small, low herb-like bushes, no trees or grass, only now the clouds are getting darker overhead. It’s great to be out in this windy, desolate place.

It’s dusk as we arrive at another deserted siding. We eat quickly and then prepare for the night. In the evenings out here the darkness comes suddenly as a thing to fear; a thing you can't control or escape. There's nothing you can do at night but try to sleep. Outside the wind beats against the old corrugated iron sheds and the rain starts.

Next morning everything is wet and the ground is thick clay mud that sticks to your boots and makes you taller the further you walk. The mud sticks to the car tyres in the same way. It’s extremely slippery and we make slow progress. The car oversteers and slides around on the road and we stop to reduce the tyre pressure further. There are no other cars around.

It’s not even 100 kilometres to Marree but it takes us several hours. At mid morning we arrive to a queue of four-wheel drives facing the other way, parked at the road conditions sign. We look back and see the road we just drove in on is indeed closed. On the other side of the town we find the road that way out closed as well. Looks like we’re stuck. At the pub we order a counter lunch and make a phone call with a payphone using coins. The TV in the corner plays sitcoms from the 90’s and somehow the ads also seem to be from the same time. At the campsite we check in and get a shower—the first since last Wednesday. In the evening there’s a bonfire made of burning railway sleepers and we mingle with the other stuck travellers and drink luxurious beer. At some point the conversation turns to politics and one of the otherwise seemingly normal people announces that they too believe all muslims should be kicked out of Australia. We’re not quite sure what to say. No one else seems particularly outraged. It seems like in some ways country Australia is still stuck in 1950.

And this matches a general attitude we came across a number of times during the trip, especially with regards to indigenous issues. I had thought that, like the Germans, Australians all harboured a kind of deep national guilt. We aren’t personally responsible for what happened to the aboriginal people, and we don’t really know what to do to fix it, but we sort of feel bad and slightly guilty about the whole situation. This trip has made me realise, at least in the country, this is not the generally held view.

The next day the sign changes and the road is suddenly and unexpectedly open. We hastily pack and leave before it changes back. As we go I realise that this is our last day in the outback and it’s kind of sad.

We finally hit tarmac at Lyndhurst with proper storm clouds gathering in the distance. Around a bend we pass into shadow and the mood turns darker. There’s rain on the hills ahead of us and we catch the edge of it as we reach the campground at Leigh Creek. The next day we’ll be in Adelaide and then it will all be over.

In the morning we eat breakfast at Breakfast Creek and then stop to fill the remaining fuel from the jerry cans into the truck; we won’t be needing them from here on. The scenery changes quickly from the wide open cattle country we’ve been driving through to hilly sheep paddocks. Large trees appear for the first time since we can remember. We pass the Flinders Ranges without stopping and come to Quorn. It’s a classic one street town but the largest we’ve seen since Alice Springs, 1,200 kilometres away. Now there are cars on the road, not just four-wheel drives. And some don’t have mud on them. People don’t wave back as we pass.

As we continue things become more developed: farmland, crops, railway tracks, wind turbines appear. We pass government billboards telling us how to live, ruining the landscape. Power lines appear. Haven’t seen them for a long time. More and more evidence of human presence appears. Soon it’s everywhere and there’s nowhere you can look without seeing something artificial. It’s actually rather distressing and I realise that it will probably be years before I’m able to get back to somewhere like that again.

And then, as the sun’s getting low, there’s traffic lights and rush hour and tailgating and suburbia! Houses in rows each with their little driveways and back yards and all the streets deserted of actual people. An inhuman wasteland given up to bitumen and cars and dead things.

We arrive at a caravan park in Port Adelaide and open the door to the smell of the sea. Suddenly there it is, the ocean on the other side of Australia. We go for a walk out onto the beach in the gloom and touch the water. It’s kind of gunky.