Road Trip Recap

A couple of months ago Lachy suggested we take a road trip, just drive inwards and take a look at the outback. We've done a few forays into the mountains and along the coast, but never actually considered driving in before. We decided to go in search of some desert. Looking at Google Maps in the vague direction we were considering, we recognised one of the place names as being near a wildlife sanctuary we wanted to visit, just over the NSW border. That became the one fixed point for our five-day road trip. We were also joined by our good friend Patrick who also wanted to see more of his homeland.

We set off on a Saturday morning, not exactly early after breakfast with friends, general slow-going accompanying my hangover, and loading up one car only to move everything over into another (a 4WD we were fortunate enough to be able to borrow). We had only driven as far north as Castlemaine (the 'Maine) by lunchtime and we'd already stopped at a market for donuts. We had a couple of pastries each from Hot & Crusty, pulled out our brand new printed and bound road map (foreseeing a lack of phone signal in our futures) and tried to decide where we were aiming to be by nightfall. We knew we'd need to be in Mildura by the end of Day Two to get out to the sanctuary early the next morning, so we were aiming to get about halfway.

In the end no decision was made until I was driving us down one of the longest, straightest, emptiest roads of my life and Lachy found a national park with a campsite not too far away. He called up Parks Victoria as the webpage suggested and they had never even heard of this park. It took me a little while to get used to the idea of actually camping because I thought we'd brought the tent as an emergency backup. I don't know what else I was expecting but I'd been so busy handing in assignments etc that I hadn't even considered where we were actually going to sleep once we hit the road.

Our tarmac road turned into a dirt one and we then followed a road sign ominously announcing 'CEMETERY' to our campground. We never actually saw the cemetery, but we did startle a mob of kangaroos as we drove into Terrick Terrick National Park. We hadn't seen another car in so long it was a bit of a shock to find someone else parked there. They turned out to be day visitors who jumped into the car and drove off almost as soon as we'd arrived.

It was only a very small park but we had the run of it. What I thought was a grassy hill shading the campsite turned out to be in fact a very large moss-covered rock. We proceeded to scramble up it and  from the summit we could see to the horizon in every direction. Nothing but trees on one side, farmland on the other. As we made our way back down again Patrick called out to draw my attention to something - a rock wallaby, grazing right in front of us. We all sat down to watch it and enjoy the quiet. I realised that my ears were ringing, and that they probably did every day, but I was so rarely in a place so quiet that I could hear it. The ringing died away as the evening drew on. I can hear trams passing and car alarms blaring all through the night from my apartment - I wonder how often my ears get treated to true silence.

We cleared away twigs and stones and pitched our tent in the campsite. We hadn't had the forethought to pack camping mats so we unloaded all our blankets and sleeping bags into the tent to deal with later. In the meantime we set to cooking ourselves a one-pot dinner with the groceries we'd bought at Bendigo on the way in. Potatoes, carrots, mushrooms and pasta all boiled together with stock cubes, and served with bread. It's amazing what you find delicious when you are out camping! We lay around, chatted and roasted marshmallows in the dark, and I started reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed with my headtorch. A beautiful place to start reading a book as adventurous as that!

We managed to arrange the blankets and all three of us into the two-man tent in such a way that we weren't too cold and uncomfortable and (amazingly) we slept. I thought we'd be up with the dawn but it was my phone alarm that woke us at 7am, and Lachy and I hiked up to the top of the stone-hill again to see the sun rising and do a bit of yoga. Well, I did Warrior 3 for about two seconds, and Lachy did a few push-ups. We boiled some water and had some hot chocolate and coffee. It was so quiet that when a crow flew past I heard every beat of its wings like it was the size of a hippogriff.

The wallaby

We drove north-west, stopping in Kerang for brunch and reaching Mildura by about 4pm. We were so exhausted from the night before that as soon as we'd found a motel to check in to we were pretty much straight into our beds reading and using our computers, taking showers and washing our dishes from the night before (there was no running water in the campsite). We mustered enough energy to drive down the road to pick up takeaway pizzas and bring them home, and were pretty much unconscious once they'd been eaten.

We got up early and restocked on groceries before heading to Wentworth, New South Wales (about half an hour away). I called ahead to the sanctuary to let them know we were coming but alas! Rain was coming in, which would turn the dirt roads to rivers and leave us stranded there for the next few days. We only had five days set aside for travelling, though, so decided not to risk it. Instead we pulled out the map again and made a contingency plan. To the south-west were both the Big Desert and the Little Desert national parks, so we'd just drive straight into them and find somewhere to camp. We stopped in Murrayville to eat our lunch of bread and hummus and enquire in one of the shops as to where we could get some chopped wood - it had been raining since we'd left that morning and wouldn't be easy to make a fire that night. We were given the phone number of a guy 'who chops wood' but decided to just buy some coals from the supermarket and figure it out.

Heading into the desert

We drove first down a wide dirt road that crossed the Big Desert, but had to turn back once we reached a sign saying it was a dry weather road only, even in a 4WD. Still, we took a break to admire the desert, though covered in scrub and not the dry dunes I had in mind, not like anything I'd seen before. We found a sealed road through the desert and finally a campsite too. Miraculously we managed to get a fire going in the rain and shoved another pot full of food into the flames to cook. While the boys kept the fire alive, I rearranged the contents of the car so that we could all sleep in the back, and it was only once I'd spent half an hour playing tetris that we realised there was no way all three of us tall young people were going to be able to sleep in there unless we had our feet or heads sticking out. We ate our dinner in the concrete hut at the campsite and repacked the car so everything was in the boot, then headed south in search of a motel.

Dinner.

The first big town we came to was Bordertown, South Australia, but Lachy mentioned that he thought someone once told him that Bordertown was a dodgy place, and that combined with the Old West name didn't put us in a great frame of mind once we arrived. We convinced ourselves that we'd be beaten up by truckers if we stayed in one of the motels, and when Lachy and I finally did get out to find there were no rooms available and ran back into the car yelling 'drive!' we gave Paddy quite a scare.

So our unfounded fears led us to Nhill, where we spent the night in the Zero Inn run by a lovely woman with a huge cat named Pizza who at first sight I thought was a wallaby. After that we set off to drive south through the Little Desert, which fortunately has a sealed road right through but unfortunately really is very Little indeed. We did however see lots of kangaroos and hear some pretty cool birds. We drove on, listening to the soundtrack from Mad Max: Fury Road until we saw something odd in the distance. 'Is that a rock?' I asked.

Mitre Rock

Mitre Rock stands out against the landscape of farmland and on this particular day it towered up into the low clouds. We pulled up in the car park, puzzled for a minute over the signs directing us to the 'Exodus Area' and the 'Priest & Deacon Area', then climbed to the top of it. On the path were droppings so fresh that we concluded they must have come from a rock wallaby watching us from around a corner that very moment. On the way back down the cloud lifted enough for us to see a small lake right next to where we'd parked.

Lachy and Paddy having a photoshoot

We continued on until we reached the Grampians, where Lachy took the wheel to navigate us along the cliff-hugging road to Halls Gap. We stopped at the Broken Falls Lookout to... well, take a look, paused briefly in the town of Halls Gap to admire the scenery/kangaroos and conclude that we'd have to come back for a hiking trip, then drove out the other side of the mountain range. At this point I saw about six emus in a field grazing alongside sheep, and I hope that they were wild, but quite possibly they were part of a farm - at any rate they were the first emus I've seen outside of a zoo. We decided we could make it to the Great Ocean Road before dark, and we found ourselves driving through the Great Otway rainforest at dusk.

Broken Falls

We stopped in Lorne for yet more groceries and then drove east to Aireys Inlet, where Patrick has a house. We ate a curry, drank wine and watched Crocodile Dundee on video (no, really) before falling asleep. In the morning I took a walk down to the beach and finished Wild before we packed up and drove back to Melbourne. In all, the trip was around 1700km, taking in desert, mountains, rainforest and ocean, briefly passing through New South Wales and South Australia. The variety in the landscape just in that short trip was so incredible - we've already started planning the sequel. A 20,000km figure-eight of Australia. Well, probably not, but at least to Alice Springs.

The ocean!

The team