Haesh works by day at salad bar in the city, washing their dishes, earning good money. He meets a young chap named Joshua here – a local – and they become buddies too. Haesh breaks down his plan to the other guys – let’s tackle the country in a 4WD, let’s live with our spirit high, while we still can, before we have to succumb to the routine workaday life of a suit wearer. Basically, let’s throw ourselves into the madness and hope by the end of it that nothing comes back broken besides the drought of adventure. The lads agree and the trip makes itself. This blog captures through writing, pictures and videos [videos, pending] the assortment of shenanigans endured by we three as we rolled around the continent.

Pink highlight: our intended route

Meanwhile Haesh and Joshua plan the elementary route out, deciding on various places to visit through the suggestions of a couple of different friends of Joshua’s (John, Dirk and Des – thanks guys!) and their own inclinations based upon famous spots and mere interest (why NOT go to Coober Pedy?), as well as make arrangements to purchase a vehicle (which we called Redcliff – to me, a bit confusing), determine the necessary gear and get the whole thing on its way. Yoshi accepted and trusted our capability to make decisions for him. Too easy.

One of the decisions we all made together, though, became the inclusion of the two guys girlfriends (Ayaka with Yoshi, and Semi with Haesh) once we got to Melbourne. We three would rumble with the brown states, and the girls could join us for a Great Ocean Road gallavant and meander from the south up towards home. I set myself the honourable goal of attempting my first ever beard-growing on the trip, and having to take daily photographs, of which I collected in the segment entitled “The Daily Beard”. (View the horror here!)
Something we needed to do before going (of course!) remained to have a big kicking party where all of the people we knew could come along and wish us the best of times on the road. So the Saturday before leaving we held our own departure party. And we had a dandy old night, with my father on fire duty (sausages?), us lot on rum duty, and tha girls and tha boys on, mmm mmm, dance duty. Yea? My house became the home of the boys before we set off, with guitar practice, packing it all together and getting ready. With the date set to “go” and our hearts in our mouths, we looked forward to the leaving, not knowing what sort of mischief we’d get up to along the way, but knowing full well we would. Tomorrow, then?

Floods, yes, ridiculous amounts of water, have stopped us in our tracks. Basically we spent the morning swearing and moving my belongings upstairs. After some food (rice + ramen with Gochujang (a hot ass sauce)) Haesh and Yoshi got into playing their guitars. Haesh, who wants to get called ‘Cool J’ from now on played “Yeohaengeul Ddeonayeo” (pretty much Korean for “alright here we go!”). Quite a shame that we won’t leave until tomorrow at the earliest. Late enough.

In the evening I decided we needed to get a roofrack tonight, and that relying on hope wouldn’t cut it, so we just had to move. I have a friend from my work at the salad bar, and he has a van with the bar parts of said racks. Dilemma though: he needed to drive the car to the coast and catch a plane to Rockhampton the next day, and he didn’t have any tools to get it off.
We needed some allen keys, so we shot off to Coles and grabbed a set. When driving back I dropped the keys and couldn’t find them on the floor of the car. I thought that maybe I’d knocked them onto the ground outside in opening the door. Pity that by this time the world had started to shit itself with water. While looking on the wet grass and the dry floor Haesh asked me to move the car seat. When I did it smacked my face (clumsy enough!) and sent my glasses down. My frigging vision! Next thing I know Tomos (the van’s owner and all round great guy) has come over and I scream to him that I’ve dropped my glasses in this surging gutter of storm. He hightailed it, tearing down the street to the drain at the end and plunging both hands into the mess, pulling out nothing. I freaked out. I can’t see a damn thing without them. What to do? Tomos ran back to the car and we looked on the ground again. He pulled them out from under the front wheel, submerged and rushing with water. Hurrah! So I hugged him, of course. And what a guy – lending us the rack for a pack of six, getting soaked with us as we then tried to get them off with the allen keys, restoring my sight from the water. Yet after all this mixed mayhem we discovered that we couldn’t move the rusted bolts. Tom just gave us the keys to his van, his blessings and asked that we didn’t crash the thing. He even offered me some marshmallow chocolate but I declined (rude vegan). We left for home, thankful for the good man, glad to see the end of the insane Brisbane weather.
In the evening we got together and discussed our itinerary, making last minute amendments, booking our skydiving near Cairns. Administration and stuff. A bit of a calm down after the mad rain / roof rack shemozzle. Let’s hope we can get this sorted and leave.

We finally left! At 8:47PM. Egads. After yesterday’s debacle which became a romantic interlude, with our spirits still high and not too dampened by the flood, we managed to get it all together. It took some effort though. We needed to get the racks off of Tomos’s van, find a tray before we left the city, and pack the lot of it into ‘Redcliff’ and piss off for two months. We also found that we couldn’t get the spare seats out of our car. Another bunch of good dudes helped us just across the road from my house at a Bridgestone. I keep thinking we will run into many good people as we go along, and we have proof enough thus far.

We made it to Tom’s house and hopped into the van. Yoshi saw this strange looking man peering at us from a distance. “Tomos?” he asks. No Yosh, just some surly neighbour. “Sure?” Inevitably Yoshi continued to call this stranger Tomos, so now we have two of them. We thought we could go to Supercheap and take off the racks but we ended up heading to a mechanics called Chequered Flags or something like that. My old school bud Andrew had tried to help us at the SC but it didn’t work out. Thanks anyway man! The blokes at CF gave it a good going over, yet yet again we managed to screw about with the bars having too much distance and not knowing until we got the rack, such that we had to take a bit of time back at the Zillmere house sorting it out. On the first night we intended to stay at my father’s in Redcliffe (which explains my original confusion about Haesh’s naming the vehicle. “but my Dad lives there!” “but it sounds so tough. It’s red, and cliff shaped…”) and we still went there. Unfortunately my old man works night, meaning we didn’t get to see him. Hopefully we do tomorrow. I’d hate to leave without saying goodbye. My sweet sister Brodie greeted us, showed us to the food and we tucked in. Delicious! Even though Day 2 hasn’t had much difference to Day 1, in terms of screwing about, we made it through, and we have actually departed. Let’s see how we go!

Haesh and Yoshi took many photos of Brodie’s cat Coby, saying they gave it ’service time’, where basically the cat looked like a model posing.

Anyway on the way to Maryborough we stopped in at Noosa and skimmed some stones. I climbed a little tree, and then we cruised to the beach. We could feel it already, the pleasure of open skies and beaches ripe for the picking. I wanted to arrive on time to our destination so I cut the Noosa visit short, and we arrived at my highschool friend Ben’s residence, where he and his lovely girlfriend Libby treated us like kings.

For dinner they served us with delicious Indian food. Yoshi said that “This is our last supper.” We knew we might not get to eat so well again for many months. Ben and Libby have two dogs Romy and Frank. Let’s just say they came from difficult homes. And how adorable! I should get a photo of the dogs before I go. Romy has this coarse hair that suits her wise dragon looking face, and Frank has a lazy ear which makes him resemble the kids that lurk around shopping centres with tilted caps. The rest of our night has us playing wooden ball solitaire and relaxing. All this luxury has made us aware of how much we will miss proper meals and comfortable beds. The good people that we keep meeting though, reminds us that it won’t matter if we have a sore back, so long as we get a smile.

We wanted to go to Fraser Island today but they had to close it due to the storms happening. Crazy ass winds blowing the beaches apart and giving it a going over meant we needed to avoid it. Instead we went shopping for our last pieces. We ran into Waity at Supercheap – a truckdriver, recent father, and good friend of my good friend Dirk. He helped us put on some straps we had just bought and showed me the recovery points on the vehicle in case we get bogged in the desert. Thanks Waity! This other guy helped too and laughed at our daftness. Fair enough. After shopping all day (Haesh saying “We stay in houses or we shop. This is not camping.”) we gunned it to Hervey Bay to play guitar, eat ramen and attempt beach cricket. Haesh and Yoshi went nuts on a fallen tree with my hatchet cos they both brought knives and want to make statues by whittling wood. Watching them go for it gave me a chuckle, this real energetic attempt at dissection, a violent flurry against the small trunk.

After nightfall we returned to Ben and Libby’s. They had other guests over, more highschool friends of mine, two sweethearts who got married last year (great wedding), Mel and Jay. We shared a few good laughs over dinner (dirty jokes always seem the funniest) and boy did we ever get to eat again like champs! Put Mexican on the menu and me on the map – I ate half a kilo of beans on tortillas and tacos, with scores of avocado pieces, tomato and lettuce. The 5 of us ate 44 units altogether. Not too shabby. The rest of the night I showed Jay and Mel the map of our travels, realising we might need a bit more preparation for the desert. We’ll see. Other than that, we chilled out, took it easy, and hoped that by tomorrow night we would get to see a camp site by the beach – our first date with the ground and its pillows.

We left Ben and Libby’s this morning, with a small amount of regret. They treated us so well, and we knew we had hardship ahead, that we wouldn’t forget their excellence. Indeed I told them I’d marry them both! Another highschool mate of mine, Jay, who had come over for dinner the night before gave us a pumpkin from his patch that just grew up in his yard, for the sake of the trip. What will we use it for? Lonely nights? Desperate feeds? Ballistic weaponry?

After Maryborough we visited my old home of Howard, when a boy. The place I grew up from 1 years old to 7. I asked Haesh for a bit of driving practice and he accepted. We pottered around for bit. I suck at reversing. Then Haesh drove again and took us to Bundaberg. No shops open on Sunday, though, so we had no food for lunch! Fortunately Yoshi knew a girl in town called Yoko, who worked at a farm in the area who could feed us. We went to her backpackers, arriving via the back street, and walked in upon three guys, two playing bongos/djembe with serene pleasure. Taka, Kota (the players) and Nomu greeted us warmly, then went back to the bongo bliss. Kota offered me a turn after a few minutes. I smacked out some rhythms and they told me I could make money on the weekends. We kept playing around, eating the tasty sandwiches Yoko provided. Then this girl came over, excusing her drunkeness and told the boys they sounded so good she could get them into the Bundaberg show for free to set up a little space to keep the beat going.

We left soon after, me telling Haesh we’d have to stay ’til Wednesday now so we could play a gig or two. Heh heh. We pushed off for Elliot Heads instead of Bargara, made some ramen and pasta with sweet chili sauce in the dark, swearing and laughing after some wine on the beach, and then I piked early, trying to sleep with a gap in the mattresses, and dreaming of all the people I know.

We swam in the ocean for the first time today, at Elliot Heads near Bundaberg. The water felt cold enough, and of course it took us a little inward coaxing to dive under and feel the rush of a temperature adjust. It looks really nice there – light sand and blue water, pretty much how you know beaches look, but all the better for seeing it firsthand. Earlier in the morning I’d treated the boys to a yoga class, where they mimicked and mocked my basic shape shifting. [video to come]

After fooling and splashing around we headed to the showers, forgetting they had the daily cleaning ritual between 10 and 11am in the Gents bathrooms. This nice lady (the cleaner) told us that younger people usually stayed around the corner past the tomato shop, after I’d blurted out that it looked like only old people here. We drove back to Bundaberg listening to MIA, Haesh and Yoshi laughing at the Sri Lankan diva’s sexy vocalising. We found a place to repair our spare, grabbed some Woolworth’s and headed for the rum distillery intown.
After discovering tours cost money we just went to the store and bought a bottle. Before this, though, a kind old girl called Wendy gave us a sample voucher for the special rum liqueur that you can only buy at the distillery. Tasty enough!

We had intended to try sleeping at the Boynedale bush camp but sundown convinced us otherwise, because of the lack of specific address and 4WDriving at night comfortability. Not quite ready yet for the super challenges. Let’s wait till the Tanami, yea? So we headed for Boyne Island instead. Phoning ahead meant we could arrive at 7PM and still get a spot.

Yoshi busted out a superb combination of Shin Ramyun and mixed vegetables. Spicy enough that my dad and little sister would enjoy it, spicy enough to make my nose run and both Haesh and Yoshi howl. The campfire atmosphere ruled supreme. With the stars above us, delicious food, a smooth red rum and a place to crash we noted one of our best nights yet, in terms of camping. As Yosh said, and Haesh agreed, “It feels so…traveller.”

At the Boyne Island caravan park we skimmed stones to see who would wash our clothes in a bucket. I lost, but the river looked beautiful, so no worries, right? We drove from Boyne to Tannum to see the beach of the town of where my good friend Sam comes from (HEY SAM). I sent her a message from a sand bank on the beach, saying I missed her. Too true!

Then we gunned it to Rockhampton and I sent my little sister Brode a postcard. We skipped lunch and made our way to Yaamba, a rest area about 40 clicks from Rocky. We want to stay in the car overnight, to see how much it hurts, to know what sort of challenges we have coming our way. Haesh showed me the best way to wash clothes in a bucket, and I hung them from a rope we set up between two trees. The old girls from the campervan next to our car cheered us on. Yoshi had started to cook dinner when we overheard a tall bearded man practicing his electric guitar, busting out some cool licks. Yosh ventured over and got to talking with “Big Joshua”, a kind man of our age, highly spirited and lyrical, and as he referred to himself, basically a big, friendly giant. We also met two French folks, Elise and Francois, who have already done a similar journey, in a van, for the past 6 months or so. (Their route took them inland in different ways, and it ran a little higgledy piggledy, but by gum they did it!). We got together, Big Joshua providing two bottles of red, the French some Ballantine’s and a goon sack (Me: “Best thing about those, once you drain them you can blow em back up for a pillow”) and via Yoshi’s cooking we gave out rice balls fried in sesame oil. Big Joshua played as we drank, some beautiful songs with deep Australian soul, smoothing the songs out of his acoustic steel. Big Joshua has a big adventure ahead of him too – he started off in Portland, Victoria, and will drive solo around the coast of the whole country, playing gigs at pubs and meeting the land his songs evoke. We hope to meet him again in Townsville at his show at the Green Ant Canteena. We all got a little drunk and decided to exercise – Yoshi screaming “Ayaka!!” with each press, Francois and Elise did sit ups to kiss, Big Joshua teaching me Mu Thai and boxing moves, how to use a skipping rope properly, and Haesh, he worked on his grammar. We also snapped a picture of both Yosh and Big Josh hanging upside down from the swings.

Later on a truckdriver named Brian who has figured out how to and now loves to kill crows as he cruises down the highway with his rig (I think he has a record of 22 in one trip) provided us with some more food – potato patties he had in the cab that his mum had made. Before tucking in I mentioned my dietary requirements and he said “Shit! I don’t want you to curl up and die like a koala.” before proceeding to list the ingredients. Besides spruiking some ridiculous cartoon and robotic porn, he also told us a joke that I might get wrong, but should sum up the spirit of absurdity. Supposedly we’d heard that for a black man to get elected as president of the United States pigs would have to fly. Well, 100 days after Barack Obama’s election, swine flu.
When it became too late we piked, but instead of sleeping in the car Big Joshua loaned us his drop tent (3 seconds and up!) and we crashed in there. A good night, and of course totally unexpected. Hence, adventure!

[visit http://www.myspace.com/joshrawiri to see Big Joshua's upcoming gigs and music!]