Wayne Thompson gathers up the boys and hits Australia's Stuart Highway for the mother of all road trips, from Darwin to Adelaide
KEY POINTS:
Two mates, a week's leave pass, a rented V6 and 3000km of road waiting to be explored. "Wahoo," I yelled as we drove out of Darwin on the "Cowboy Corridor" heading for Adelaide.
The boys' road trip through Australia's Red Centre, was finally under way on a mild June Sunday. For years Ron had talked about doing it and we'd nodded in agreement. He loves driving open roads and Peter and I are happy countryside explorers. But it was always something we could do tomorrow.
Suddenly we realised we didn't have another 50 years to talk about it, so we booked our tickets and here we were ... in highway heaven.
For some reason the Aussies we met in booming tropical Darwin didn't share our enthusiasm. Some sample reactions: "Why would you when you can fly it?", "Hope you've a book because there's a long way between anything to see."
They tried to steer us to Kakadu and other beautiful national parks in the Northern Territory. But our sights were fixed on a pathway of bitumen through the desert.
The Stuart Highway, No. 87, which we followed for most of the trip, is smooth seal, straight and wide.
I'd imagined it would be empty and lonely after we cleared suburban limits. But it's well used, being an important artery for farms, mines, small towns and military and scientific bases scattered out in the continent's vast remote lands.
Throughout the daylight hours there's a procession of white four-wheel-drive station wagons, each toting a tin boat and towing a camper trailer or caravan. Roof racks are stacked with spare wheels, cans of water and motor fuel ready for when they turn off the tarseal and bump off along a desert track to a camping spot hundreds of kilometres from the nearest shop or petrol station.
My other fascination was with the road trains: supersized trucks hitched to three or four trailers carrying 250 head of cattle in one load, petrol, produce and mining machinery. Meeting them was an event. They came out of the blue heat haze into view on the glistening bitumen, like ships floating on a canal. Peering up at "the bridge" you saw in the driver's face the concentration needed to control a 50m wriggling snake of steel at 130km/h.
At Darwin, we had stern advice on how to overtake a road train. "If you can catch 'em you will need a kilometre of clear road to get past."
At a fuel stop, Peter asked a driver: "How long does it take to wind this up from stop to full speed? "About 23km," came the reply. Then Ron asked him: "Then how long does it take you to stop? It's okay. I don't want to know."
The speed limit of 130km/h is a sore point with locals because up until January the only limitation was their engine and nerve and they don't like being restricted. "It's made it dangerous by increasing the risk of driver fatigue," complained a man in the bar. In the good old days driving his big car at 200km/h he got a long trip between towns over nice and quick.
It's easy to see how you could go that fast - one stretch is 86km without a bend - but for us conserving fuel was more tempting than speeding when the map showed towns were few and far between. The rental's onboard trip computer advised how far we could travel at a certain speed.
Petrol then cost A$1.35 ($1.57) a litre and could be 10c dearer further inland. The fuel for the total 3200km we travelled cost about $650. Refuelling stops seemed to appear just when the fuel gauge was getting twitchy.
Service stations, known locally as roadhouses, are like small towns. Some are historic places, set up where there was a reliable water supply, or a telegraph or cattle station at crossroads. Some are pure 70s style, erected when the highway was sealed. There was one, a day's drive from Adelaide, built in a ritzy-woolshed-meets-ski-lodge-with-open-log-fires kind of style.
Roadhouses serve food, drink and localised souvenirs, and usually have a camping ground, known as a tourist park, with basic motel-like accommodation. One morning, we hit the road earlier than usual and by 10am came across Curtin Springs Station ("1,028,960 acres and 3500 cattle") which offered breakfasts of bacon and eggs and tea for $10.
We were waiting for our brekkies under a pergola, watching an emu respond to the soft words of an elderly Aboriginal traveller, when the cook came out. "Put your hands over your ears boys," she said, mightily whacking a steel bar against an old engine cylinder hanging above us. "Calling the boss in for tea."
First to the cookhouse door was the boss' little dog. She hand-fed him a scone before the boss arrived.
We never had to book ahead, always finding a bed and a feed wherever we finished up. This was usually before nightfall at my request. Years before I had been warned not to travel Australian rural roads after dusk because that's when the wildlife flock to roads and a collision can be fatal. I've seen a family of kangaroos standing beside the road, blinking at my car headlights and black cattle camouflaged against the tarmac.
On this trip, the roadkill we saw included a camel, so we broke the sundown rule just once. The 1930s pub at Daly Waters about 600km from Darwin, looked inviting and its cool interior was filling up with campers from the adjacent tourist park.
We were in luck. One room left, down the hall. Peter and Ron took the key to view it and came back laughing. In the car, heading towards the next dot on the map, they said it was a tin shed with three single beds, right next to the stage where the band was tuning up for the nightly barbecue party. We needed sleep.
Thankfully, before long the next dot materialised as a roadhouse with a dozen trucks parked outside - always a good sign - and behind it a modest motel.
We watched a sky of red flames and then shyly leaned into an empty space at the bar beside a happy crowd of locals and contractors watching an Australian Rules match on the big screen. The roast special and red wine was every bit as good as I had anticipated at the recommended tourist trap we had turned our backs on.
Highway motel rooms are A$82-90 a night but you get air conditioning and fly screens. It was winter then and though there weren't many flies or mozzies around, it did get nippy in the mornings. A touring motorcyclist said it was 4C inside his tent and there was ice on the roof.
Our main diversion off the Stuart Highway was an 800km round trip on sealed roads to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park to see Uluru (Ayers Rock) and the Kata Tjuta granite domes, and later to walk in Kings Canyon in the Watarrka National Park.
Uluru was my favourite sight. To me, it felt like a crucial part of the construction of the planet, like the cap on a pinion that went straight down, holding the earth's structure together.
We saw it changing colour and mood at sunset and a sunrise - along with hundreds of others - and only one person was disappointed. You see, Ron is spoiled. Every night he can watch the sunset on Mt Taranaki.
A highlight for Peter was several hours of walking on the top of the Kings Canyon where the trail looks down the 270m ravine of crumbling sandstone.
We were disappointed in that the "desert" we thought we would see from the highway was unlike the North African version. Mostly, in the Northern Territory, it an was expanse of scrub-covered red-earth plains offering a bit of feed for cattle.
The effect of Australia's drought was more evident as we went further south towards Adelaide. Huge salt lakes looked like drained harbours.
Generally, our trip expectations were met, because we saw something different and interesting on the road by day and had agreeably social times at night.
The drivers, Ron and Peter, were relaxed at the end after doing the equivalent distance of Auckland to Dunedin via the West Coast and back.
Afterwards Ron summed up with: "I loved it, because you're looking down a road and driving fast for two-and-half-hours and the horizon doesn't end."
GETTING THERE
There are no direct flights to Darwin. Air New Zealand does fly direct to Adelaide.
BEST SIGHTS EN ROUTE
Australian Aviation Heritage Centre, Berrimah
National Road Transport Hall of Fame, Alice Springs
Uluru - Ayers Rock
Old Timer's Opal Mine, Coober Pedy
Woomera Heritage Centre and Missile Park
BEST WEATHER
May to September
FURTHER INFORMATION
There's a useful interactive map of the Stuart Highway at www.exploringaustralia.com.au/map.php?s=stuart.
You'll find general tourist information on Northern Territory and South Australia at www.tourismnt.com.au and on www.southaustralia.com.
* Wayne Thompson paid his own way down the Stuart Highway.
