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The Road Trip from Hell
 
THE ROAD TRIP FROM HELL Submit a Tale here | More Tales
I was gutted. I could've had a lift from Darwin to Cairns the next day but Kathy begged me to stay with her a wee bit longer till her bus leaves for Alice Springs and then on to Melbourne. But where the fuck was she now?

She met a friend the day before and didn't show up in the evening. All in all I hadn't seen her for 2 days. She just told me that she cancelled her bus ticket and wanted to go to Cairns with me. Good. So she was somewhere in Darwin, staggering around stoned with that friend of hers and left me to organize our lift through the desert. I checked several message boards, rang a couple of people and finally I was lucky. We got a lift with a Slovakian couple. We'd leave the next day.

The next morning we were pretty excited when we waited for them - Roland and Andrea - to pick us up outside our hostel. They were late but their car turned out to be a true road trip car. A rusty old Ford Falcon Station Wagon turned around the corner. Some of the windows were covered with tin foil to keep the heat (and view) out. We tried to place our rucksacks onto the backseat. There obviously wasn't enough room for the two of us and our bags but somehow we managed and finally squeezed into our seats. If someone would've opened the doors without warning we would've fallen out, I'm sure.

So off we went. Kath and I were looking forward to a funny trip, some cold VBs in the evening and maybe something good to smoke but our good mood changed quite quickly. The first thing that made us suspicious was Roland & Andrea's taste of music - jazz and Slovakian gypsy music, whereas Kathy and I were more into the Beastie Boys, Eminem and stuff like that. But hey, they were in their late 20's, early 30's, not in their 50's or 60's. But anyways, Kathy gave them some of her tapes which was pretty cool but soon they put on their own music which was awful. I was lucky cause I had my discman with me but Kathy's walkman didn't work properly so she had to bear the `noise`.

The next thing was that they drove v e r y s l o w l y. Too slowly. Those who've already been to Australia know that there's NO speed limit in the Northern Territory. We managed about 90k/ph on average. Do you know what it feels like to be overtaken by road trains? We never ever overtook anyone. I could swear we were the slowest car driving along that road ever.

Another thing made us wonder. The couple didn't have any idea where we would be staying for the night. They just said "Well, we've got our car and a tent. Two people can stay in the car and two can sleep in the tent. We can camp somewhere beside the road." Great. I call that wild camping. Didn't they know that just a couple of weeks ago an English backpacker was killed in the NT and the killer was still wandering around somewhere out there? But we didn't have a choice really. We insisted on staying on a campsite though. (Something else you have to know: Kathy and I fucking hate camping.)

Plus we insisted on leaving pretty early the next morning, something that seemed to surprise Roland and Andrea. But didn't they know it's really crazy and dangerous to drive in the dark in the outback?! We wanted to be at our next stop before dusk. The two of them obviously had no idea where that would be ... they just said they wanted to keep driving till they get too tired. All our arguments were no good - they just did what they wanted to do plus they were as entertaining as sleeping pills. So we crept along that road in the middle of nowhere - even slower during the night when we did about 70k/ph or even less. They were afraid of hitting a kangaroo, something that had already happened to Kathy and I when we were driving back to Alice from Uluru (Ayer's Rock). That was also one of the reasons why we didn't want to keep going in the dark.

On average we spent about 10 or more hrs in that bloody sardine-tin of a car per day which was real torture. We were thinking about catching a bus in Mt. Isa and going to the East Coast by bus from there but that wouldn't have saved us any money. We were desperate, but also tired of everything. We just gave up. When we finally arrived on the East Coast it felt like heaven. It was like Christmas, Easter and your birthday all together on one evening. We paid them their bloody AU$100, grabbed our bags and made our way to our hostel. We didn't exchange e-mail addresses. Those were the worst 3 days of my entire life so far.