It all star­ted with Domi­n­ique and me think­ing that 3000 km is too long to drive. That’s when we looked into fly­ing to Dar­win, but we soon dis­covered that a one way flight is around 400 to 500 AUD. Far too expens­ive for our lik­ing. That same day we star­ted to make a little flyer, copied it and handed it out to back­pack­ers and put it up in hos­tels and inter­net cafes around Cairns. We didn’t actu­ally expect many people to call, but appar­ently there are loads of people look­ing for a lift to the Top End, as we got flooded with requests.

The next morn­ing we met Julien, a french guy, and Yuto, a Japan­ese bloke, in a café in town. They seemed nice and relaxed enough that we agreed to tackle those 3000 km together, start­ing at 8 am the next day.

The drive from Cairns back down to Towns­ville was unevent­ful. In Towns­ville we bought water and food, filled the car and the spare tank up with gas­ol­ine and we were on our way into the out­back. None of us really knew what to expect. The air was filled with excite­ment and a sense of adven­ture. An hour into the drive and we were all bored to death. I mean, we had been told that there is noth­ing out there, but there really wasn’t any­thing out there. Well, that’s not entirely true. There are trees, some­times loads of them, some­times hardly any; there’s grass, lots of it, but all very dry; there’s cattle, loads of dead kangaroos on the side of the road, the odd road train, 50 m long trucks, and every 200 to 250 km a little set­tle­ment, where you can fill the car up with gas.

Pet­rol in these little vil­lages can be ridicu­lously expens­ive, but they can charge whatever they want to. They know exactly that trav­el­ers have to fill up their cars every oppor­tun­ity they can get. The most expens­ive gas we found was 1.70 AUD a liter, a full 60 cent more than what you nor­mally pay. At this par­tic­u­lar gas sta­tion we chose to ignore the warn­ings and kept going with half a tank. We knew that we only had to drive 200 km to the next one, but we still got a bit nervous when the needle star­ted to slowly drop down! We obvi­ously made it, but from that point on we did fill Pump­kin up every single time.

While it was really an inter­est­ing exper­i­ence, we were bored most of the time. After driv­ing straight for half an hour I found myself wish­ing for just a tiny little bend in the road. I actu­ally made a little movie of one of those roads, so feel free to watch it:

On the first day we drove until we hit Mount Isa, about 1200 km.The most excit­ing thing that happened on that day was being pulled over at night by the police for a ran­dom breath test. We had stopped earlier on to get some booze, but, thank­fully, Domi­n­ique, who was driv­ing the last stretch of the day, was the only sober per­son in the car. That night we all slept in the car at some super­mar­ket car park. On the second day we star­ted driv­ing at 7 am and made it all the way to Dar­win, which means that we might have gone a little over the speed limit from time to time, but we were all glad when we finally arrived at 9.30 pm.