Singapore to Brisbane - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 90

I haven't driven a car since we left the States and I've been itching to get behind a wheel. A drive across
the Outback seems like potentially the best road trip available on this planet. Granted, we don't have a car.
Nor do we have any clue as to the possible perils involved in crossing the Outback. But we've managed to
get ourselves three-quarters of the way around the world so far. We're feeling cocky.
Our initial hunch is that renting a car will be pricey. (After all, we'll be asking the rental agency to
let us drive their vehicle across an endless expanse of desert doomland before we ditch it on the other
side—thousands of miles away.) But it turns out that one of Darwin's rental outlets is offering a relocation
deal. They need to quickly ship a sedan to a sister franchise in Sydney. If we can drive the car there for
them, and complete the journey in four days or less, they'll give us a massive discount on the price. Total
rental cost: one dollar per day.
We can't believe our fantastic luck. Until we hit the road and look at a map. “Hmmm,” says Rebecca,
sitting in the passenger seat of our newly acquired Toyota Camry as I drive us south toward the dead, empty
center of the continent. She's studying the Australian road atlas that we bought at a bookstore on our way
out of Darwin. “It's come to my attention that Australia is very large,” she observes.
To make it from Darwin to Sydney in our allotted time we'll have to cover about six hundred miles a
day. We've tied ourselves to waking up at sunrise, getting in the car, and then driving without much pause
until dusk. (We daren't drive at night on these dark, lonely roads—for fear of breaking down, leaving the
car to seek help, and being devoured alive by a pack of ravenous dingoes.)
We now understand why the rental car cost us only four dollars. It's because we're not customers. We're
hired help. We're doing a difficult, demanding job, and we've been tricked into paying a small fee for the
privilege.
No matter. It's worth it. I'd forgotten the amazing rush of driving fast down an empty two-lane highway.
Sure, we've had a measure of autonomy with other vehicles on this trip: our bicycles in Vietnam, the scoot-
er in Langkawi. But there is nothing like a car. The private, mobile world of its cabin. The picture windows
front, sides, and back. Point the grille in any direction you please, depress the accelerator, and feel the free-
dom. With an Australian country song blasting from the radio, we begin eating up the miles.
DARWIN on its surface appears to be an unremarkable suburb—the type you might find anywhere in heart-
land America. But its generic, two-story buildings and sleepy culs-de-sac belie its freakish setting. It is in
fact an outpost. A fragile fortress surrounded by the most brutal forces of nature. On one side is a deadly,
unswimmable sea. (“Don't worry about the sharks,” a taxi driver reassured us. “They've all been eaten by
the saltwater crocs or poisoned by the box jellies.”) On the other side is the barren, pitiless Outback.
Within a half hour of exiting the rental car company's parking lot, we leave all hints of human existence
behind. There is nothing out here but red dirt, lime green scrub, and a broiling orange sun. The deeper into
the Outback we go, the more desolate it gets. We can drive for forty-five minutes without passing a single
car and go hours without seeing a house or a building of any kind. No gas stations. No billboards. It's a
startling emptiness—an absolute emptiness—of a sort that is difficult to find in America these days. Which
makes sense, given that Australia is nearly as large as the continental United States but is home to 20 mil-
lion people instead of 300 million.
At one point, we drive past a massive brush fire burning not a hundred yards from the side of the road.
The flames are ten feet high. There's not a single soul in sight. We're the only witnesses to this hellacious,
raging inferno. With nothing to block the wind, a fire like this can suddenly sweep across the plain, inhale
all in its path, and breathe out a wispy trail of ash. During a recent set of fires near Melbourne—one blaze